The late 2000's gave us a cool new type of game which I like to call the "media player" genre: you load up music files from your own computer and they generate the level you play, often with elements of a rhythm game. This fad gave us many classic games such as Beat Hazard and Audiosurf, and continues strong to this day with games like Melody's Escape and Drive Any Track. It's personally one of my favorite types of game. Unfortunately, it also gave us some real stinkers like Ugly Baby and Turba.
Turba is supposed to be a rhythm-based match-3 game, but it's so ill-conceived and badly-designed on so many levels that it’s almost a work of art. The basis of the game is that you’re supposed to select groups of same-colored blocks, then right-click to clear them to the rhythm of the music. You get more points for using multiplier blocks, for keeping the rhythm, and for selecting one group of each color before clearing them at once. There are three game modes which determine how the tiles will appear: Free mode will give you a Bejeweled-style wall of blocks, Descend mode makes the tiles slowly push from the top of the screen like Tetris Attack, and Ascend mode makes tiles gradually appear on top of other tiles. To help you control the board, you’re also given a choice of a rechargeable special power, which ranges from generating wildcard blocks to shooting blocks with a laser. The special powers gradually unlock and grow stronger the more you play.
The game concepts are all horrible, not just in practice but also in theory. For starters, the core game mechanic of dragging paths through colored groups is a terrible idea. Depending on what mode you play, the whole board is gradually moving, and punishment tiles are decaying and causing the board to collapse. In other words, the game consists of dragging paths through blocks which are always unexpectedly shifting or falling from underneath your mouse cursor. Imagine trying to draw pixel art in Microsoft Paint as the window will randomly jerk around, and you can get an idea of how it feels like to play Turba. I think the idea was that you’re supposed to carefully select tiles between beats of the music, but it’s ruined thanks to the beat detection.
Beat detection is downright unreliable. The game’s registration of beats seems mostly random except on the most specific types of songs, so it’s completely up to luck whether or not clicking on a drumbeat of the song will break your combo or keep it going. To get reasonable scores, I had to find a (very) small handful of songs in my library where the beat detection actually worked and stick to those.
Then you have to deal with the bombs. You cannot even rock out to your own music, because the game will constantly spawn time bombs which beep obnoxiously like 90’s-era digital alarm clocks. They spawn on random tiles which must be cleared before they blow up into a 3x3 square of punishment blocks. On the higher difficulties it’s nearly impossible to get rid of them, because they’ll just keep spawning, and often land in places that are unreachable anyway. Defending against bombs is not interesting and not fun, not to mention that it ruins the music, and I don’t see how anyone thought it was a good idea.
The menus are so badly-designed that they must be seen to be believed. They’re filled with pointless, lethargic menu animations that sometimes take up to five seconds for buttons to slide into place or fade in. The selection box around items is a soft glow which is so hard to see that it might as well not be there. The menu music has some of the most depressing, boring tracks I have ever heard. Whereas games like Audiosurf punch you in the face with electronica the minute you hit the title screen and get you pumped to play the game, Turba’s “song select” menu music will forever be burned into my mind as the official theme song for watching paint dry.
I’ve hunted for the achievements and tried to master the gameplay, and I feel like I gave Turba an honest chance at capturing my heart, but it never even come close. The gameplay is just aggravating, obtuse, and unrewarding. The minor satisfaction I got from holding a long beat streak was destroyed by unreliable beat detection breaking my combos, the massive frustration of trying to paint selection areas as the board is constantly falling and shifting, and that constant beeping of the time bombs over the music that never seems to go away.
Bleh. Awful.
