Lumines: Electronic Symphony (PS Vita) review

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The Tetris effect. It’s a real thing – go and look it up – it’s what happens to your brain when you spend enough time and attention on an activity that it begins to take over your thoughts and dreams. You’ll be in real danger of succumbing to the effect if you spend more than a few hours playing Lumines: Electronic Symphony. It’s the devilishly addictive sequel to one of the PSP’s best games, updated with higher resolution graphics for the PS Vita’s OLED display.

If you aren’t familiar with the original, or any of its console re-releases, it only takes a minute to learn the simple gameplay mechanics. You control the descent of an unlimited supply of 2×2 blocks arranged in different colour combinations. Like Tetris, if these blocks reach the top of the screen it’s game over, so you have to delete them as quickly as possible.

The aim of the game is to create squares, rather than lines. You can rotate each block to match it with the others already on the play grid, and when a 2×2 square of matching colour is formed the horizontal line that travels across the screen, wiping out created squares to make room for more.

This all sounds fairly simple, but the magic lies in how the developer has combined music and visuals into the gameplay. Rather than one looping backing track, Lumines has a whole album of remixes and original tracks that merge into one another as you play. The colour patterns and background graphics also change once you reach a certain score – even a subtle change in colour can be enough to through you off your perfect game, so you have to keep alert when the screen begins to shift.

The line that deletes your completed squares also travels at a faster or slower pace depending on the tempo of the track. Slower songs mean a slower line, so you have the potential to create more squares per phase, increasing your score with bonus multipliers. Conversely, a faster track means your supply of squares begins to drop faster, forcing you to keep up to avoid wiping out.

Even if you’re a Lumines veteran, you’ll appreciate the huge number of new skins and music that haven’t been seen before on previous versions. The whole soundtrack is incredibly varied, ranging from the esoteric to more well-known mainstream artists, but it flows neatly between tracks and there are very few damp squibs. With so many skin flavours to uncover, it really brings the vivid colours of the Vita’s OLED screen really come into their own.

You now unlock new skins through an XP system, rather than reaching them in the single player mode like the original game. This is much better for casual players that may struggle to make any headway in the campaign. XP is shared across every game type, so you can soon start unlocking new avatars and skins after just a few sessions.

Electronic Symphony introduces some new mechanics that will keep you on your toes, most notably the Shuffle block which appears every so often to ruin your day. It rearranges the layout of the grid, sometimes to your benefit but more often than not it creates utter chaos, destroying your carefully laid plans and forcing you to adapt quickly. The life-saving chain block, which deletes every block of the same colour that’s touching another, regardless if it forms a square or not, no longer has to be formed into a square to work either, so it can instantly turn a faltering game around.

Like many Vita games, you can play Electronic Symphony using the touchscreen, swiping left and right to move blocks and tapping to rotate them. This works fine and smartphone gamers should feel right at home, but it’s nowhere near as precise as using the Vita’s excellent D-Pad.

Electronic Symphony is more evolution than revolution – many of the extra game modes found in the console versions have been removed, but the range of new skins and music adds some welcome variety to the single player campaign. Whether you’re already a Lumines addict or simply like the occasional puzzle game, you’ll definitely find something to like in Electronic Symphony.