Cubetractor (PC) review "I was immediately fascinated by the overhead, SNES-style, 2D graphics, its lush lakes, meadows, and cutesy characters reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda and the like. Though, on closer inspection, I did find it amusing that the backgrounds consist of sprites taken or edited from a RPG Maker tileset."

I've taken a liking to the tower defense genre... from a distance, and I say that because, whenever I actually play one, the intrigue slowly dwindles away. It's probably due to the fact that I've always been a more hands-on guy in terms of action, wanting to be the person kicking your butt, rather than build a bunch of automated something-whats that do all the work. So it usually takes a certain type of gimmick or unique draw to get me playing any tower defense title nowadays, and without even knowing it, Cubetractor did just that when I was scrolling through Steam's strategy catalog. At first glance, I was immediately fascinated by the overhead, SNES-style, 2D graphics, its lush lakes, meadows, and cutesy characters reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda and the like. Though, on closer inspection, I did find it amusing that the backgrounds consist of sprites taken or edited from a RPG Maker tileset.

Of course, no acknowledgement of this is given in the credits. Go figure.

The thing that made me purchase the game, however, was the unusual method of attacking: your blue, four-legged, mailbox-shaped robot of a protagonist has the ability to pull cubes towards him. I was curious how something like this could even sustain gameplay over a period of time, and once I finally realized this was actually a tower defense game, I was like, "I gotta see how they make this work, if at all." And you know what? It's pulled off pretty well, and only because specific aspects of the tower defense formula is modified. The basic template is here, where you must erect turrets and such to annihilate the opposing forces, but there's a catch. Instead of waiting for them to come to you, Cubetractor reverses the trend by dropping your character at the enemy's defenses!

With the concept of having to build structures against opponents that fire when anything get in their sights, the difficulty is already up there, but the devs, Ludochip, stack another challenge on top of that. Creating turrets and other objects is not as simple as selecting an area and hitting the button, and this is where the whole pull mechanic comes into play. In order to make any item, you need to pull two cubes together, and different combinations form different creations: two Spine cubes make a turret, a Spine and an Earth cube morphs into a Power Plant that provides faster firepower to turrets, and so on. With a good eye, too, you can easily pull cubes into enemies, if a hill or lake isn't in the way, that is. Pulling things around might sound easy in writing, but having to execute the task is much harder, since cubes are placed in specific spots on a field that usually require precise timing with the pulls. This is all while the enemy is firing away at every opportunity, mind you, and suffice it to say, you really need a controller for the game.

Community review by dementedhut (September 16, 2013) So what's the second game going to be called? Operation Wolf Returns: Operation Thunderbolt: Second Mission?