Lightfish - Qix? Never heard of it.

Lightfish is another Xbox Indie refugee that's headed over for the PC market and its essentially a clone of the arcade game 'Qix', in both games you play as a small icon who has to claim the majority of a large playfield without getting hit by any enemies. Its a pretty simple game and one that has had a large amount of sequels, remakes and clones. It can even be played online, for example you can play it HERE (via JayIsGames). With that, here comes Lightfish.

Lightfish tries to shake things up a little big through various different enemies, there's standard ones that bounce all over the place, ones that drop bombs about and ones that home in on you. There's also level modifiers with fire blocks that can kill you if you touch them, to ice blocks that slow you down If you hit them. The modifications continue through the scoring system where 'capturing' any enemy or block part, adds multipliers to your score meter. Getting killed meanwhile resets that multiplier back to the x1 you originally started with.

Its a nice enough set of additions but this is sort of where the game runs into issues. The first problem is the very short length of the game, with a total of 5 level-sets, each containing nine quite easily completable levels, the game itself becomes very easy to clear. The other main problem is that while the game doesn't do anything wrong in any way, it doesn't exactly do anything right either, the designs are not exactly memorable in any way, neither is the music, nor the gameplay. Nothing really stands out and as such, while you may enjoy playing the game, the chance of you really coming away with fond memories is slim.

Overall its what I call a 'Stocking Filler' game, its a nice enough game at a cheap price but its really just a prelude to playing something bigger and better.