This week, I will be talking about Tetris 99. I’ll be talking about its gameplay and my thoughts of the game.
Unlike other player vs player Tetris games that contain a bunch of gimmicks, Tetris 99 is pretty straight forward. The main menu is pretty bland with only two options, playing a round or looking at your stats. If you decided to play a game, you will be put into a waiting room with 99 other players. Once 99 players join, the match begins. At the start of the round you can choose four mode that will determine where your lines go, random, medals, knock out, and attacker. Random does what it says and matches you up with random people. Medals is a lot more unique compared to the other three, because it is a Tetris 99 exclusive. Basically if you knock out a player, you gain medals that will boost how much points you earn and if you knock out a player with medals already, you gain their medals. So if you choose medals, you target people with a large amount of medals. Knock out mode makes it you target players on the verge of death, making it easier to knock them out. The final mode is attacker, and this mode makes you target the player in first place. By default, the system has you set to random, but you can change it to suit your play style. Once you know who you’re targeting, the game begins. For the most part, the game is quite lax during the first few lines. However, the difficulty ramps up twice during the game. The first difficulty spike occurs when only 50 players remain and the second when there is 10. Depending on what score you get, you will gain a set certain amount of points for your account. Generally, the higher the level, the more likely you’ll be targeted by other people.
So far, I really love and dislike the game at times. First is the menu, I honestly don’t mind the straight forward approach the developers decided to go with. The reason for this is it makes finding a match a breeze. Forcing everyone to play one game mode makes the waiting less than two minutes most of the time, which is not something I can say for every game. Sometimes I wish there were some added features like room creation or allowing you to play with friends. Another feature I would have liked is a worldwide leaderboard. Right now, all you can do is compare scores with others who have the game. As for the gameplay, I find the actual Tetris experience fine. My problem is with the targeting, I honestly find it very inconsistent. Sometimes, you could have no one sending lines to you while other times, there can be five people trying make get you top out. I also would complain about the controls but this is more of a switch problem, and not a Tetris 99 problem. It’s just the way the buttons are placed and lack of d-pad makes quick pace play hard. So far, I’ve only manage to win one game, get second four times, and third once. I find this quite sad seeing as I’m the best Tetris player out of my group of friends. Although, I may be able to chalk up my lack of skill due to the ergonomics. Perhaps in the future, I will invest in a pro controller or a keyboard adapter.
In the end, I enjoy the game quite a bit. It also helps that it’s free and only needs Nintendo’s subscription service, which is something most people already have. The different modes are cool, getting Tetris is still fun, and getting top ten always makes me happy. Overall, I like the game a lot and hope to win more games in the future.