Threes! Review (BrandonGiesing)
If you never heard of Threes, this game is the original game that got knocked off a billion times as 2048.
You might be wondering then... Why should I buy this then if there's 1000s of 2048 clones for free online? Simply put, the charm and difficulty.
The tiles have cute voices and faces with each having their own personality and the music (by Big Giant Circles who you might know from Just Shapes & Beats among many others) is some of the most relaxing music in gaming. As for difficulty, it has subtle differences vs 2048 that make it a lot more difficult to master (many people "beat" 2048 on their first few games, it took 3 years for someone to "beat" Threes). Plus of course, shouldn't you support the people that came up with the idea in the first place.
As for the PC port itself, it runs buttery smooth (although you would expect that for a 2014 mobile game) and adds a few new additions:
- New song for Night Mode by Big Giant Circles which is a certified lo-fi jam. The original releases used the same song regardless.
- The standard Steam fare like cloud save and achievements, no risk of losing your big high scores
- Full Steam Deck support, even native touch which is awesome to see
- Vertical Monitor Support
I only have a few very minor complaints about this updated release:
1. It doesn't support Ultrawide Monitors in Fullscreen Mode, you will have massive black bars on the sides which is a shame since it's just a single-color background anyway, it would've been insanely easy to just fill out the space with the Light/Night Mode background color. Oddly since the game scales in Windowed Mode, it does fill out the screen there.
2. While the new Night Mode song is great, it would be nice if that could be toggled in settings for an original experience.
3. Obviously for such a simple game, you wouldn't really expect a crazy number of settings but it would still be nice at the very least if you could pick a resolution instead of only Fullscreen or not and no volume options (we can toggle music and sound effects separately on or off but can't say make the music quieter while keeping SFX at full volume)
4. It's pretty much a straight port other than the new song and Steam integration, might have been nice to maybe add some new stuff like different skins or maybe something like a timed mode where you see how high you can get in a specific time.
Overall, it's a great port of a great mobile game, get it if you really love Threes or want to support the original developers since they got screwed by 2048 but otherwise, this doesn't really change enough to require a rebuy if you are fine with it on mobile or Xbox already.