Let the blocks hit the floor
(This
review contains minor spoilers!)
The only game I can say with complete
confidence that I’m actually good at is Tetris.
I can line up those blocks like nobody else. On the other hand, I’ve never
played Puyo Puyo before now, so this
is my first time checking it out. So is this crossover worth your time?
In my opinion probably not, unless you’re
a big fan of both Puyo Puyo and Tetris.
Much to my surprise (and subsequent
disappointment), this isn’t a marriage of Puyo
Puyo and Tetris. Instead it’s
more like a Puyo Puyo game with Tetris added as the integral gimmick.
Now this wouldn’t be a problem if Puyo
Puyo was fun to play, but sadly it isn’t. For those who don’t know it’s
sort of like a combination of Bejewled and
Tetris. Cute globs of goo fall from
the sky, and matching four of the same colours allows them to disappear. Your
main goal is to line them up in a way that creates combos, removing lots of
lines at once.
While it sounds fun on paper, in
practice the game is really, really boring. It’s much slower pace than Tetris, and it can be immensely
frustrating when it seems like the game just doesn’t want to give you the
colour you need. Every time a Puyo Puyo level
came up I groaned, because each of them could go up to seven minutes in length because
of how slow they were.
Fortunately, Tetris is just as good as ever here. I really wish it had gotten
equal screentime as Puyo Puyo though,
because basically every fourth level would be Tetris with the rest of them being Puyo Puyo.
The game’s main line of gameplay is
the “story” mode, but calling the half-assed plot they give you a story is
stretching the truth pretty far. It’s basically just levels of the titular
puzzles strung together by cutscenes of shrieking anime girls. While at first I
thought the story would be so bad it would be good, by the third world I
started skipping it entirely.
This wouldn’t be so much of a problem
if I could escape the characters during gameplay, but Puyo Puyo Tetris refuses to allow you to escape from its anime iron
grip! The characters cheer you on during gameplay, using the same lines over
and over again every time you clear a line.
Every.
Single.
Time.
You don’t know how grating it is to
hear “Yes!” “Solved it!” “Fireball!” “Ballistic!” and the like over and over
and over and over and over and over and over. It legitimately got to a point
where I just couldn’t take it anymore and refused to go any further in the
game.
There’s also various singleplayer and
multiplayer modes, but I refuse to play any more of this game. Much to my
dismay the character voices follow you to these modes as well, and there isn’t
a standard Marathon Tetris mode
anywhere to be found, so there’s really no point.
Puyo
Puyo Tetris is a mediocre game that quickly becomes an annoying one. Maybe
if I enjoyed playing Puyo Puyo I
would’ve enjoyed this game more, but as I don’t this is a game I cannot recommend
in good frame of mind. The story is childish to the extreme, the non-campaign
modes are a waste of time, the lack of a Marathon mode limits replayability,
and the constant, inescapable voice acting turns the game from a decent puzzler
to an exercise in patience. If you really want to see what this game is all
about, just download the free demo from the Nintendo Switch eShop.
FINAL SCORE
3/10
Bad
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