Tessellating Wrestlers Shouldn’t Be This Boring
I’m not convinced that you could find a camper video game released in 2025 than Lucha Align. What makes the campness even sweeter is that we’re not sure if it’s intentional.
Lucha Align, you see, is a shape-sorting game where each shape is a Mexican luchador, but the luchador wrestlers are contorted into Tetris-block shapes. Rather than look pained in these back-breaking positions, they have a gleeful smile on their faces, some with their tongues out. Then they’re tessellated onto the floor of a wrestling ring, as tightly packed as humanly possible. It’s an orgy of latex and flesh. We can imagine it opening eyes to newfound fetishes.
There is a game underneath the hot and bothered wrestlers, but it’s nowhere near as interesting.
Tetris In Spandex
As we’ve mentioned, this is a shape-sorting game. There has been a glut of these this year, so presumably there’s a big and growing fanbase for them. Think of the genre as a cross between jigsaw puzzles and Tetris and you’re pretty much there. Each level starts with a large, empty expanse for you to fill. Ranged across the bottom of the screen are different shaped tiles – in this case Mexican luchador wrestlers – and each tile can be picked up, rotated and plonked into that large expanse. Your aim, should you choose to accept it, is to fill the grid without leaving a single gap remaining.
Different games in the genre tend to have different rules for said plonking. In Lucha Align, the rules are very loose. You can place any shaped wrestler into any location where it will fit. It doesn’t matter which wrestler they rub up against: placement is very much up to you.
The only rule, if you can call it that, is that an extra star can be gained if you abide by the level’s objective. The objective is different per level. A piece is displayed in the top-right of the screen, and you are requested to have a minimum or maximum number of them in the solution. A T-shaped wrestler might feature with a ‘Max 2’ next to it. This means that your solution can only have 2 or fewer of them, or you will lose the potential star award.
Wrestling With An Easy Difficulty
On the one hand, having an optional requirement like this is a positive. The difficulty levels are chosen by you, the player. You can choose to make things more difficult for yourself and get a star for the effort. Sure, there’s nothing you can actually do with that star – not even gain an achievement – but there’s a sense of closure that you might not have gotten from taking the easy route.
On the other hand, it makes Lucha Align easy, almost to a ludicrous degree. To accommodate this secondary objective, the designers have given you more pieces than you need. In some earlier levels, you have almost double the pieces you need, across a variety of shapes. What that means is that there’s no single solution to a given puzzle. We’d wager that there are millions of permutations, and we’re not being hyperbolic. Because there are so many pieces, many of which are 1×1, it leaves you with gargantuan room for error.
There is a ‘cozy’ argument for this: that playing Lucha Align is relaxing, and the surplus pieces means it’s more like a game of Unpacking than a jigsaw puzzle. Confounding the player isn’t the point. Instead, it’s a gentle sorting process. The player places the bigger and more awkward pieces first, and the remainder are left to idly fill gaps.
Every Match Feels Thrown For The Player’s Benefit
I don’t buy that cozy argument. If I wanted to slot geometric pieces onto a board then I’d buy a Lego Basics set. There needs to be something more, some reaction to my moves, some gentle strategising or choices. But as a toy, Lucha Align isn’t particularly joyful to play with, and there’s no real reaction to the player’s inputs. As a cozy game, it feels oddly lifeless.
Even chasing the subobjectives, which does enliven things a little, is a path that leads to boredom. Because there are still thousands of winning permutations, even with the limitations. It’s only in the last two or three levels that the screw tightens somewhat. But by then it’s too late: the achievements have been gained, and most people have got what they wanted. Which is 2000G, it should be noted.
I’m not completely averse to the shape-sorting genre, but it has to be treated as a base or foundation upon which other ingredients are added. You can’t just skip the flavour step. Additional limits, rules or mechanics need to be added, otherwise you have a non-game, a set of blocks to play with.
Sorting Shapes With A Lack of Stakes
Lucha Align makes that critical mistake. It’s a shape-sorting game that adds the shapes, throws in some sorting, but then neglects to include stakes, rules or anything else of value. The end result is blandly easy, like packing a car boot after a shopping trip. Sure, that car boot is full of winking and smiling luchadors, but it’s not quite enough to salvage Lucha Align.
Important Links
Get Ready to Rumble (on a Puzzle Grid) With Lucha Align – https://www.thexboxhub.com/get-ready-to-rumble-on-a-puzzle-grid-with-lucha-align/
Buy, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/lucha-align/9PCDNVVGMZ4Q/0010
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/lucha-align-xbox-one/9N1996P0FZ9L/0010
Or grab a Windows PC edition – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/lucha-align-windows/9N9S99S0BVNT/0010
