Tetris 99 – Game Review

Written by: Marisa Schuler

There are certain games to be played for certain moods. When you want to feel like you have a well-balanced work and social life doing meaningful tasks with meaningful relationships, you might play  a Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley. When you want to feel like a merciless god crushing insignificant mortals underfoot, you over level yourself in any standard RPG or take away all doors in the Sims. When you want to hate everyone and everything around you, you jump on team chat in Overwatch.

Tetris 99 is the game you play when you want something that starts off relaxing but steadily morphs into a nightmare as everything you’ve built and worked towards crumbles around your futile efforts to salvage something passable from the wreckage.

Fresh off the Nintendo e-shop, Tetris 99 is a free-to-play title from Arika and Nintendo that finally got people to buy Nintendo Online subscriptions on February 13^th, 2019. It’s mostly free, it’s Tetris, and it’s… a Battle Royale?

The Gameplay

On the surface level it’s Tetris, and if you’re familiar with any versus style Tetris games, you can probably skip this bit. You stack infuriatingly shaped blocks called tetrominoes on top of each other to form neat lines in order to make said tetrominoes disappear so that they don’t create a towering mess of gaps resulting in a game over when they hit the top of the screen. You can hold on to one piece at a time, so you can swap a tetrominoe in or out depending on the convince of its shape. If you play Tetris like normal and focus on keeping your screen low and clear, you’ll do alright and have some fun as you outlast the other three basic scrubs in the game, placing 96^th after your thirty seconds of gameplay.

Tetris 99 is more than just Tetris. It’s a Battle Royal in which you play against 98 other Tetris players, you need to do more than keep your screen low and pretty to keep playing. You must slaughter your competition.  On the most basic level this involves clearing as many lines of tetrominoes in one move as possible to send garbage lines to the bottom of another player’s screen. For example, if you get a tetris by clearing four lines at once, you’ll attack another player by adding four lines with a single gap to the bottom of what is already on their screen. This sends them toward the top and closer to defeat, especially if you clear multiple lines back to back to really put the heat on them.

They of course, will be trying to do the same to you. A player can defend themselves from incoming garbage by clearing lines to negate the lines about to appear at the bottom of their screen.  The left side of your personal Tetris screen will show how much garbage is coming your way at any given time, and the severity of the incoming garbage is indicated by color. If you see red garbage, you’ll likely want to be rid of that fast, but sometimes it’s a judgment call about if you’d like to defend yourself against incoming garbage or keep building your board in order to attack someone else.

Skippers, stop skipping. Versus style Tetris is easy enough to grasp when it’s thought about in terms of one on one, but it’s important to remember you’re playing against up to 98 different people, and trust me, by the time that number is manageable, your screen won’t be. Let’s talk about targeting because the game sure won’t.

The 98 other players’ screens will be displayed to the left and the right of your personal Tetris board.  Out of the 98 different people on screen, you can target ONE to attack with your cleared tetrominoes at any given time. You can single this person’s screen out in a few different ways:

-selecting an opponent board with the touch screen

-flailing wildly with the left analog stick

-picking a chosen criteria with the right analog stick and letting the game do the work

Sometimes when I think, “and screw this stranger in particular,” I’ll tap on someone I want to target with the touch screen. Don’t use the left analog stick; it’s silly. Using the right analog stick based on criteria was the simplest and most effective method of targeting in my experience. The criteria can be set to Random, KOs, Badges, and Attackers.  Random is the default from what I’ve seen, so instantly switch it off that. KOs will target players close to being knocked out, and it’s what I set my criteria as most of the time. Badges will target players with the most Badges, which is useful for reasons we’ll get to shortly. Attackers targets people targeting you, but honestly, get over your grudges and let it go. They aren’t worth it.

Alright, so that’s how you target someone. Since you can only target one person, it makes sense you can only be targeted by one other person too, right? No. There is no justice here. I’ve had matches where I haven’t felt pressure from being targeted until well into the top 50 or top 10, and I’ve had matches where there were seven people on me before I placed a single tetromino. If you have a lot of people targeting you, be ready to fight off a lot of garbage at once. Things that might draw fire from people include building too tall of a screen tempting those looking for easy KOs, earning yourself a lot of Badges from being a ruthless killing machine, and old fashioned bad luck from people set to random.

To finally address Badges—because once again, the game really doesn’t—and why people will target you when you have them, Badges are earned when you knock people out of the game and tracked by that golden percentage meter at the bottom of your personal board. Badges can also be taken by knocking out players that already have them, hence the targeting option. The reason you want to earn these and even take them from others is because badges increase how much garbage you send when you clear lines to attack another player. They make you a force to be reckoned with, enabling you to play more aggressively, but there is a give and take with them since they make it hard to fly under the radar.

Tetris 99 is about managing aggressive gameplay against venerable opponents with defensive gameplay against multiple attackers. You need to do more than outlast other players in this Battle Royal, as it is difficult to knock out players in the top ten without Badges, but being too aggressive can lead to towering tetrominoes. Oh, and in good-old-Tetris-fashion, tetrominoes fall faster the longer you last. Forget I said anything about balance. If you make it to the top 10 you’ll just be scream-crying the whole time as that long piece falls straight down faster than you can comprehend while the Tetris Masters laugh into their Switch screens from their Tetromino Thrones because you are your own undoing.

The Graphics

 Tetris 99 looks like what 2000s cartoons thought cyberspace would look like. Its color scheme ranges from lime to teal to lapis, and there are bubbly circles everywhere because they could.  It isn’t bad; it’s just really specific. It gives me strong PlayStation One vibes, and I’m here for it. The menus are simple, and the layout of the gameplay screen is clean. You can see all other players’ boards in real time clearly, and when a player is knocked out it shows their placement instead and a golden KO if you were the one to knock them out. While I’m a little bummed that I can’t change the style of my tetrominoes, the overall style keeps the game from looking messy and is instantly iconic.

The Audio

I won’t lie, I’ve been listen to the music from my first win the entire time I’ve been writing this. I haven’t left that screen, and it’s not just because I’m still gloating hours later; the victory music is stupid fun. It’s got turntable scratchy noises and sounds a little like a Katamari Damacy song.

In addition to the sweet victory track, this game’s audio also features screams. Wait. No. That’s me. I’m screaming as the original Tetris theme gets faster and more stressful the longer you last until it eventually turns into something I think might be “Flight of the Bumble Bees”, but honestly I’m so focused on survival by the time I reach the top 10 that I really can’t tell. It’s fast and stressful. It’s about 10,000 beats a second probably. Really gets you in the mood for inevitable failure.

Overall, the sounds are bouncy and fun, screams aside. The menu and match generation tracks are light and Techno-y. It’s like a Tetris rave. Like the graphics, audio was kept simple but given enough care that it doesn’t feel underdone.

Overall/Replay Value

Tetris 99 is free, and it’s a Tetris. If you own a Switch, there is no reason not to have this downloaded, because it is absolutely worth the space on the system’s limited memory. You do need Nintendo Online to play though, which will cost money. Is it worth it to get online just for this game? It was certainly the tipping point for me.

I did all my playing and screen shots for this review on a borrowed Switch because I hadn’t coughed up the money for the online subscription yet. Nothing says regret like winning a match on someone else’s account, and now I certainly have my own to try and work my way to the top spot again. Nintendo Online is the cheapest online subscription for the major consoles. You can get a year for just yourself for $20, and it’ll enable you to play more than just Tetris 99. If you’re spending that just for this game, $20 is still fair if this is your type of game. It also seems like more will be added to the game in the future, so it certainly should be worth it in the long run.

If content is truly going to be added regularly and if the game continues to run as smoothly as it does now, then Tetris 99 will be worth playing regularly. As it is now, wait times are short and gameplay is seamless, making it all too easy to jump into one addicting match after another. That being said, the current lack of extra modes might make extended gameplay feel repetitive or shallow if you aren’t a Tetris addicted monster like myself.

Conclusion

Tetris 99  is the type of game that is addicting in the moment, and it’ll be addicting again when you forget it and rediscover it eight months from now. It’s a simple enough Battle Royal system that anyone stands a decent enough chance based on their Tetris skills, but the targeting and Badge systems add a layer of depth that can be used to give players the upper hand. The weirdly-stylish, nostalgic presentation is honestly more than we deserve, but that might just be me. Tetris 99 gets an…

80 out of 100—a solid game for what it is with a bright future.

Pros

• It’s Tetris.
• Dominating people
• Seamless multiplayer
• Free
• Short match wait times
• Future content

Cons

• Screams
• No in game explanation of certain concepts
• Nintendo Online required
• Current lack of extra modes