Digital adaptations of physical board games bring a lot of advantages if you don’t have space to store the boxes and contents. Often other bonuses like cheat prevention or online play can be great too. Rush Hour Deluxe is an interesting case in point though. Its a very workmanlike adaptation in many ways but then offers some curious extras you wouldn’t be able to create easily or cheaply with the physical version.
If you haven’t played Rush Hour before, the object of the game is to get the red car out of the traffic jam. Various cars are placed into the square board that can be moved horizontally or vertically to create space to move the red car towards the exit slot on the other side of the board. It’s like a traffic jam sokoban and the fun of the physical version is the thousands of layouts you can find online using the other car pieces to take a simple premise to near infinite replayability.
This is where the digital adaptation falls down. We have 60 levels, sorted into five difficulty levels but that’s not quite the hundreds or thousands you can arrange with the real game. Here, you see the game from a top down perspective and its not a pretty visual display. There’s nothing wrong but there’s nothing to talk about either. The other negative I’d like to point out is that you have to move through lots of cars using the d-pad to eventually get to the car you want to move and then select it. It can often totally skip the car you want to select and its a bit fiddly and cumbersome.
That said, the puzzles here are nicely done because Rush Hour as a concept just works. The satisfaction of getting the red car out of traffic carries across to this version and so whilst the game has zero frills in the audio or visual department, the core puzzle is in tact and sound. The main bonus here is the 2-4 player local multiplayer modes. Here you can all race to solve one of those 60 puzzles as fast as possible, or in the least amount of moves possible. This is a decent addition to the game and adds something unique to the digital version that the original game doesn’t have. Whilst Rush Hour isn’t a game I’d immediately think of for a race mode, in practice it works well so long as everyone understands the goal of the game and is switched on mentally. Otherwise, one person might be first and will have to wait several minutes for other players to solve a puzzle.
I bought Rush Hour Deluxe on a 90% discount and so I’m quite pleased with the amount of game I got for the price. It’s standard RRP is far too high though and it shouldn’t really be above the budget minimalist PC puzzle game tier you find on Steam for under £5. It is also an anomaly because this version of the game is fundamentally worse the the physical board game as it lacks the replayability options of it. My recommendation order is physical first, then deep sale on this second.
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