Tetraminos Review

This is another one of the newest Minis on the European Playstation store. Going by this is from the same studio as Brick Breaker (which was a Breakout clone), i bet you can't guess what Tetraminos is a clone of...

...Yeah, Tetris. However, it's Tetris with a few simple, and quite helpful improvements. As you will notice in the gallery and gameplay video, Tetraminos adds a sort of "shadow" to the gameplay. By this i mean the game shows you an image of how the block will land and add the the current blocks, helping you to easier select the best position for the block. However, this helpful addition comes at the cost of being rather confusing - as you will probably think when you see the gameplay, it often becomes rather confusing as to which is the "shadow" and which is the actual block (no matter how strange this may seem). Eventually however, it is easy to get used to the addition and easier to keep track of which is the actual block. Though this seems like a rather simple feature, it is indeed very helpful at planning places for your blocks.

It is also good to see that this take on Tetris includes different difficulties, which is simple, but something that a lot of these games fail to implement.

As well as the simple "Classic" Tetraminos, which is the Tetris we all know and love, there is an added "Obstacle" version of the game. This mode adds a simple block in the middle of the Tetris grid, which must be avoided as the blocks are falling. Although this sounds like a negligible addition, it actually makes the game more devilishly tricky than normal. It's one thing to be able to make a block in Tetris; but it is other to be able to do this whilst avoiding a block on the way down! However, there is one small thing; the block acts as any normal block in the Tetris world does, i.e. it dissapears is in a full line. This was unexpected from me; i expected it to be a permanent feature, as something to permanently avoid, rather than something that could be removed every so often. However, it's good to see a differentiation of the classic Tetris, rather than just a total rip off of the game everyone has already played a thousand times before.

All in all this is a nice little Mini. It's Tetris, which everyone knows and loves anyway, with a few simple additions which are good enough to keep it fresh. The core game is still Tetris, and that's brilliant. As one of the cheapest Minis available, this is definitely worth a look.

Check out the gameplay screens and gameplay videos below.

Tetraminos