OK, a show of hands: Who here has never heard of Tetris?
Nobody? Thought so.

Now, another show of hands: Who here can’t just play a single game of Tetris, but instead quickly become convinced that the turn on it will be the all-time high score. Ah, right again.

We are light years beyond Tetris’s heyday, but the basic principle still has plenty of appeal: a simple game with simple mechanics, lots of colors, short but repeatable gameplay, and even some social appeal (“I can do better than you can!”).

Enter Kubik, a game from the developer Ketchapp Games. Sight unseen, consider it a slimmed-down, 3D version of the ever-popular Tetris. The game is very family-friendly (though younger children may struggle a bit with the 3D spatial relations involved to play) but adults would also enjoy this title, too.
Ketchapp Games has dozens of games available on the Play Store, including “Don’t Step on the White Tile” (a game my kiddos still pick up and play after more than a year later).

Setup

Setup is very easy; just download from the Play Store and enter the game. There extremely little in the way of settings or options. Essentially you can turn the background music and subtle sound effects on or off, buy some of the premium world bases up front, and check the leaderboard. Other than that, it’s a big pulsating ‘TAP TO PLAY’ icon square in the middle of the screen to get you going.

Gameplay

Gameplay is very solid; it works just like the old Tetris, but with a 3D element added to it. You start with a bare 3 square x 3 square grid at the bottom. From above the screen drop down geometric shapes of various sizes and geometries (again these are essentially the same shapes that are in Tetris but with a 3rd dimension to them).

Your job is to spin the grid at the bottom using basic left and right screen swipes, lining up the shapes on top of one another to make the most efficient block tower possible. You want to leave air spaces at a minimum, as with them your tower can grow quickly. If it hits a certain height (shown by a super-imposed indicator).

I found the gameplay to actually be pretty easy. The speed at which this game moves is almost “slow”…..but it’s kinda nice respite from a lot of current games that put an almost-impossible expectation on your supposed cat-like reflexes (I don’t have any of those).

Additionally, the game also lights up the particular squares that the currently-falling block will land on. Rotate the floor, and it will update the squares that will be landed on. While this does assist in making Kubik kind of easy, it does do a great job in preventing the game from being unplayable, in my opinion. Trying to guess which squares would be landed on, only to be proven wrong again and again…..I would have uninstalled this game in short order. Thankfully that’s not the case at all here. If you are certain of the falling block’s location, a simple screen tap will speed it’s drop to full free-fall to get to the next piece faster.

The only real upgrade available is in the “world” that your floor happens to sit on. They don’t offer any strategic or performance enhancements, but hey, they sure are cute.

Visuals and Audio

You can probably guess by now that I’m a fan of the visuals in this game. The colors are solid but a bit muted, and the motion throughout the game is buttery-smooth. It almost can lull you to sleep it’s so nice.
Which brings us to Kubik’s audio. There are very few and subtle sound effects (little ‘plinks’ and ‘dunks’ for game action. I think the background music is love-it-or-hate-it, as it’s has a twangy new-age/zen feel to it that will either have you enjoying yourself immensely or looking for that mute button. But in the end it does work for this game, as the overall feel isn’t hyper-competitive mayhem, but relaxed distraction.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed Kubik; it knows what it wants to be, and almost completely succeeds. My only personal want is to manually dial the difficulty up or down, based on the player or the mood. But other than that it’s a perfect Tetris alternative in this 3D, touchscreen world we’re living in.

Download Kubik from the Play Store here.

Overview:

Noah Camera is a camera app designed to enhance your photos and selfies with filters and allow you to easily share them on social media and with friends.

Developer: JP Brothers, Inc.

Cost: Free (with ads)

Impressions:

Noah Camera is a camera app designed to enhance your photos and selfies with filters and allow you to easily share them on social media and with friends.

Noah Camera is a neat app for hardcore selfie takers. While I may not consider myself a part of that crowd, I can certainly see the potential in a solid camera app with a myriad of filters available to make your pictures as good as they can be. Noah offers just that, a simple but solid camera app with dozens of filters to customize your shots and make them stand out. While I probably wouldn’t use this over my stock camera app, it is indeed a solid camera experience standalone.

I’ve taken some shots with my stock Google Pixel camera app, and then with Noah and some filters so you can see some examples of how Noah can change your photos and the quality in which they come out:

The filter selection is extensive, to say the least. Noah Camera sorts them by type and shows a preview on the viewfinder before you take the picture so you’ll know exactly how it turns out. Many familiar filters from Instagram and other camera apps are present, and some fairly original ones as well that really transform your photos. Selecting the desired filter is easy thanks to the swipe to select feature, as well as a gallery of filters that pops up along the bottom for fast and easy selection. Noah also allows for some personalization of the app itself, with a customizable shutter button and the option to run in silent shutter mode, for the sake of others around you.

Noah Camera also has some strong social sharing options, with the ability to post straight to Instagram and Facebook right after you take your photo in-app. Of course, it also saves to your gallery so you can do whatever you like with the pictures, but the easy sharing options are excellent especially for Instagram junkies.

Admittedly there isn’t much else to go on with Noah Camera, as it’s simply a camera app with some fancy filters and sharing settings, but for how simple it is it works very well and is very user-friendly. I do have some complaints, like the watermark at the bottom right, which is also customizable but is difficult to remove. There is a setting for removing it but it didn’t always work and most of my photos have the “Noah” watermark in the corner. A small complaint but still annoying. Also, a lot of the filters seem the same to me. Many really alter the look of the photo, but there are a bunch that mostly wash it out or make it darker in small increments which I feel would have been better implemented as a slider for saturation or brightness.

Conclusion:

Noah Camera is a useful tool for content creators and selfie enthusiasts of all stripes. It’s simple, straightforward, and has a bunch of useful features to help set it apart from other camera apps on the Play Store. Be sure to give it a try.

Download Noah Camera from the Google Play Store