Tetris Mania
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| Tetris Mania

Change is good. Progress is great. And evolution is a marvellous thing indeed. Especially if you're a monkey.

But you can throw all of those maxims out of the window when it comes to Tetris, which many people would argue is unimprovable. Drop blocks to make lines. How can that brilliantly simple concept be tarted up without ruining what made it special in the first place?

EA Mobile is the latest to try with Tetris Mania, its all-new improved version of Tetris, which adds three new game modes alongside the classic edition.

Before saying whether it works, what are those new modes? We don't usually quote instructions verbatim in Pocket Gamer reviews, but for this we'll make an exception.

Cascade mode: "Score big by using gravity to clear multiple lines with a single drop. Player sets up the matrix to cascade."

Fusion mode: "Connect atoms to the fusion block at the bottom to clear the goal. Atoms and fusion blocks trigger gravity in a line clear. They never clear from the matrix."

Sticky mode: "Tetriminos have 1-4 colours, each separately affected by gravity. Red sticks to red, blue to blue, etc. Clear bottom line of blocks to reach goal."

Now, we're not picking on whoever wrote the instructions – they did their best. The new game modes really are that complicated, even after you've watched the in-game tutorials. Considering Tetris is a game whose basic gameplay mechanics even your granny can pick up within ten seconds, this is overcomplication to the Nth degree.

Of the three, Cascade is the most approachable, in that you can judge which pieces are going to fall to the bottom when you create a line, and plan chain reactions accordingly. But the Sticky and Fusion modes left us scratching our heads for a significant amount of time before we figured out what was going on.

Admittedly, if you're a hardcore Tetris-head who's exhausted the possibilities of the original, you'll probably grit your teeth and persevere with the new modes for variety's sake. And EA has made sure the game's graphics are crisp and clear, although we could do without the Tetris theme blaring out at high volume when the game starts.

But there's an equal argument to say that people who love Tetris (pretty much everyone who's ever played it) don't really want a new version.

Down the years, there've been numerous attempts. Tetris 2, Tetris Blast, Tetris Plus, The New Tetris, Tetris Cascade... the list goes on. But none of those games have even reached a fraction of the popularity of plain-old Tetris.

That's not a reason on its own for writing off Tetris Mania, mind. Fair play to EA for trying to think of a new spin on the famous puzzler.

But Tetris Mania does suffer from the problem that plagued many of those other games: its improvements don't actually improve the gameplay. In fact, they turn it into just another fiddly puzzle game that will leave you hankering after the original.

Tetris Mania

A brave attempt to inject some new tricks into Tetris, but the results will leave you puzzled
Score
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)