Product: Tetris Pop|Publisher: EA Mobile|Format: Mobile
|Genre: Puzzle
|Players: 1
|Format: J2ME
|File size: 510KB
|Reviewed on: N95 8GB other handsets|Version: Europe
Tetrishas been sitting atop the mobile sales charts for years now, seeing off all-comers to sell millions of downloads. It's the 900lb gorilla of the mobile gaming market. Are gorillas native to Russia? Anyway...
It's worth remembering, though, that among those other games that have failed to dislodge Tetris are several official Tetris sequels.
We've seen Tetris Ultra, Tetris Mania and Tetris Blockout on mobile, and while they weren't necessarily flops, they certainly didn't unseat the original version.
So, people don't want Tetris in new, flashy, improved versions that have been mucked about with for the sake of variety. They want classic Tetris, and they've been voting with their wallets.
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However, Tetris Pop may be the game to change their minds.
It's still Tetris, with falling blocks that you rotate and position to form lines, but chopped up into 17 different mini-games - each with its own rules, obstacles or requirements.
We explained some of them in our preview of the game, but to recap some of our favourites: Limbo has a line coming down from the top of the screen, which you have to keep your blocks below for a set time.
Split only lets you drop pieces in one half of a screen alternately, making it harder to build lines up. Detonator has you connecting a fuse with a bunch of bombs to blow them up. And Ball has you dropping pieces while trying to avoid bouncing balls.
You get the idea. All these mini-games are played against time limits - usually either a minute or 75 seconds.
Structure-wise, they're grouped into 'worlds', each containing 2-4 levels, which each involve playing three mini-games. If that makes sense. It's a bit Mario-esque, with World 3-1, World 3-2 and so on.
The care that's gone into serving up a varied selection of mini-games has extended to the structure around them.
So you get a star rating out of five for every level based on your speed or efficiency, and there are 'feats' to be earned too, for particularly cool achievements when playing. All of this adds to the game's replayability, which is huge.
The extra modes help this. Pop Chrono gets you to enter how long you want to play for (between three and 20 minutes), and then serves up a random selection of mini-games with time limits to fill that time - drawn from the ones you've encountered in the main game.
Meanwhile, Pop Mix lets you scroll through all the unlocked mini-games, turn individual ones on or off, and then just play a selection that way, leaving out the ones you don't like.
One quibble is that it'd be nice to have a pure unlimited Tetris mode in there too. The nearest you get is the Vanilla mini-game, but that caps you at getting a certain amount of lines in a time limit - you can't just play forever.
It might sound like a small thing, but think if you upgrade your handset, and want both Tetris Pop and the original, to play according to your mood.
Even so, Tetris Pop is great. The graphics are colourful and bright to suit the name, and the music bends the original Tetris theme tune into a variety of new sounds, some of which will have purists foaming at the ears in rage more than others.
I'll be honest: Tetris Pop probably won't replace Tetris at the top of the charts in the long-term. But as someone who's usually pretty cynical about reworkings of this particular retro classic, I'm well and truly hooked.
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