Wait, another dual-stick Xbox Live Arcade shooter for the Xbox 360? Say it ain’t so! Well, it is so. Death By Cube is just another dual stick shooter that’s been released on Xbox Live Arcade, and in fact, it one of the worst ones that’s been released on the platform.

And just like last Xbox Live Arcade game that we reviewed, and that pretty much sucked, Death By Cube is published by Square Enix, and a pattern is emerging, a pattern suggesting that there isn’t much quality control as with the publisher’s bigger titles. Anyways, Death By Cube will take you a while to figure out. The first time you play it, it’s chaos, the fifth time, still chaos, and an hour into the game, it’s still chaos, but you have a hint of what’s going on.

So after playing it for a few hours, we’ll try and explain it as good as we can: it’s a dual stick shooter — use the left stick to move, the right to shoot — and that’s all you do, you basically wait for an onslaught of enemies to shoot within a given time frame, if they overwhelm you, you die. Oh, and the enemies are cubes. Oh, and there’s a lot of blood when you shoot time. Honestly, the whole thing is just confusing, so watch this YouTube video of the gameplay in action. Watched it? Okay, back to the review.

The overall feeling of the game is that it’s a HL2 or an Unreal mod, and that it lacks everything the mods usually lack, and feature all the shortcomings and lack of polish. And that’s exactly how Death By Cube feels. In fact, we’re sure you’ll find a mod out there that’s better than this game, because Death By Cube doesn’t have one of the most important ingredients in a game: inspiration. Everything seems uninspired and rushed, put together just so looks like a game. Compile it, pack it, ship it. On top of that, the game has no potential either — no interesting gameplay mechanic, not story, no humor or style, there really is nothing interesting about it. Nothing. Even the $10 price tag is disappointing.

The Good:
Uh… Lots of Cubes and blood.

The Bad:
Uninspired
Tedious gameplay
Weak visuals
Confusing
Frustrating

Overalls score: 1/10