An amazing puzzle game that will have you hooked with simple, but fun gameplay and a beautiful soundtrack.
The core of the game itself, gameplay is very simple using blocks comprised of four different sqaures in two-tone to create a solid four (or more) piece square. Score is gathered by the amount of "squares" you've assembled and a timeline bar moves to erase the squares you've created. Aside from other elements such as sound, graphics, etc., the main reason the game doesn't grow too boring, too quickly is that the timeline will frequently change tempo along with the rate that the blocks fall, causing you to rethink strategies often. This tempo change is varied from music track to track. Sometimes you won't immediately see the difference and sometimes it's obvious. Much like Tetris, you can hold down on the directional pad to drop the square faster. This leads to the only real issue that I have with the gameplay. Sometimes you'll quickly drop a piece, only to find the next piece quickly reloaded and dropped as well. This can be a virtual game killer and often requires quickly tapping down rather than holding it. Aside from that, the game is practically flawless.
The graphics for the game won't impress anyone who wants to look for next-gen graphics in a handheld system. In fact, if it wasn't for the music being CD quality, this game could have easily been in an earlier system, albeit much choppier and not quite as colorful. The problem with the graphics comes at the cost of gameplay. You're usually to involved in the gameplay element to see a lot of the abstract animation, however slower levels will allow you to spend a little time with the whole picture. Characters (or avatars as they resemble forum graphics) are pretty dull too, especially the ones won in Vs. CPU mode compared to their CPU counterparts that are full of color and animation. Also, sometimes the color combinations for some tracks tend either hurt my eyes or make me lose my focus. However, I suspect this may be intentional.
The sound is what drives Lumines. The lush techno/trance tracks that play in the background can greatly assist your ability to play the game, in essence helping you get into a groove and move with the tempo of the gameplay. I was very happy with almost all of the tracks and I believe I still need to unlock one of two more. Sound effects in the game also help boost the soundtrack and change along with the colors, tempo, and music. Flipping pieces and moving them quickly horizontally will often give you different sounds unique to each track.
Sadly, value is one of the things lacking to some extent in Lumines. While there is a decent deal of unlockable content, you're always left wanting more. The game supports Ad Hoc, but not Infrastructure. This is a terrible crime in my opinion. This game oozes multiplayer mode online. The simple gameplay and appearance would likely suffer very little lag and disconnections and having a scoreboard for people to post their would increase the replay value. Still the gameplay itself makes up a large portion of this score and it's simply worth coming back to.
Surprisingly, with all of the high-end graphics, 3D gaming, and crazy ports of older titles, Lumines still stood out a constantly replayed game for me. Even with more visually impressive titles and some games with previous star power behind them, I still enjoyed this game the most out of my collection next to Burnout Legends. I still play it occasionally proving that it's well worth the $20 to buy it.
The Good: Excellent gameplay, very little load times, cheap.
The Bad: No online mode, somewhat lacking in the amount of skins, minor control issues.