Review: Tetris DS
Score: 90
Now this is more like it. After half a dozen game reviews, a chance to really wheel out the superlatives. I guess we'd held off buying Tetris DS because it was, well, tetris, a fairly tired old game now, but I absolutely take my hat off to the development team because they've breathed new life into the format.
Yes, there's the usual 'standard' tetris gameplay, but even this is nicely realised with good graphics and sound and ever-increasing difficulty level. But the key to Tetris DS is the variety of different games based around Nintendo's 'tetrominos'. Firstly there are 'line clear' (where you start with a number of ragged rows) and 'vs CPU' (where you try and clear lines faster than the console, with every row it clears appearing on your screen and vice-versa) modes, both well worth having. But this is only the start...
'Push' lets you play the same push-push game against another player, over the DS's Wi-Fi. 'Touch' features a tetromino tower that has to be dragged into position, block by block, to reduce its height to zero - much harder than it looks - and a mission-based 'drag the tetrominos' puzzle system.
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copyright IGN)
'Puzzle' introduces pre-designed grids of blocks and offers up the right pieces to solve the rows, but it's up to you to pick them in the right order and orientation. 'Mission' works in timed or untimed modes and sees you having achieve certain challenges while playing the normal tetris game.
Finally, my favourite, 'Catch' is a vertical scrolling mix of Tetris and Galaxians. You rotate your tetromino space-ship and move it around in order to catch the advancing blocks and grow your own ship. As the ship core reaches a certain square size you start earning points, whereupon most of the core collapses and you start building again, and so on.
Tetris DS is just perfect. The gameplay, the variety, the multi-player options - even the price (it tends to be cheaper than most DS games). Run, don't walk, and get your own copy now. Really.