Meteos

8.0
Good

Gameplay	8.0	"This isn't your ordinary puzzler!"
Graphics	8.0
Sound	6.5
Value	7.5

By Daniel Needham

The fate of the entire universe hangs in the balance in Meteos, a frenetic, fun, and innovative puzzle game exclusively for the Nintendo DS. It's appropriate that the game is the work of none other than Q Entertainment, designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi's studio, that also gave the PSP one of its first and best titles, the puzzle game Lumines. Meteos offers up a great, original experience that's plenty of fun whether you play it against the computer or against some friends.

Not many puzzle games bother with storylines, but Meteos is a little different. In fact, the game is bold enough to include an entertainingly epic introductory cut scene detailing a science fiction apocalypse. The planet Meteo spews forth a deadly rain of fragments called meteos, which annihilate practically everything that gets in their way. By some chance, a planet survives the assault as several like-coloured meteos latch together and fly off from where they came. Now various extra-terrestrial races must fight to protect their homes by firing the meteos raining down on them back toward their source.

In a typical game of Meteos, you'll spend your time keeping an eye on the DS's bottom screen, in which multi-coloured meteos rain down constantly, piling up higher and higher. Don't mistake this for another Tetris clone, though. For one thing, you can't actually control the meteos as they fall, as you might expect from a typical puzzle game. And once they've landed, all you can do is shift them vertically up or down through the stack they're in. You need to do this because, if three like-coloured meteos are placed adjacent to each other either in a row or in a column, they fire off like rockets, launching themselves and all the meteos stacked on top of them up toward the top of the screen.

You're constantly trying to stop the meteos from piling too high by blasting them back up into space. Theoretically, the more meteos that pile up, the easier it is to find a nearby few that can be matched up and blasted away. The thing is, the more meteos that pile up, the more momentum you'll need to push them off the screen. This is a formula that sets up a non-stop string of life-or-death near misses.

The many different levels in Meteos represent all the different planets that have come under fire. Each planet has its own unique properties and other twists that you'll get a feel for. It doesn't take long to notice that different planets seem to have a different sense of gravitational pull. On some planets, you may need to fire off your meteos stacks using consecutive launches, forming triplicates multiple times within a single stack to gather enough steam to launch them away. But on other planets, the meteos will jettison off screen with much less effort on your part.

The single-player star trip mode offers three distinctly different paths and multiple modes of difficulty, making it highly re-playable and worthy of being the primary mode of play. There's also a free-form mode that lets you choose a stage and different settings and start from wherever you would like. A survival mode tests how long you can survive a meteo downpour, and challenge modes let you see how many meteos you can launch and how high you can score in a given period of time.

Meteos was clearly designed with multiplayer competition in mind, so it's great that the game gives you the option to take on up to three other players using just one cartridge, through the systems download play feature. You're limited to just a few different stages this way, though, so for best results everyone should have a copy, and you can convince your friends to get their own by uploading a demo version of Meteos to them if you want. Multiplayer Meteos is functionally equivalent to playing against the computer, though it can be inherently more fun to stomp your friends instead of the CPU.

The game's visuals aren't dazzling, but they're clear and attractive for the most part. Some stages and their meteos look better than others, but overall, Meteos has a fun look to it that keeps up with the rate of the action. The various animated icons for all the different alien species are particularly appealing and show quite a bit of personality for being just little bunches of squiggles.

The game's audio fares even better, especially due to the eclectic musical score, which features different themes for every planet that all change with the tempo of the action. Meteos doesn't seem so remarkable in still images, but when you see and hear it in full effect, it'll seem a lot more exciting and enthralling.

One of the better titles to hit the DS so far, and one of the best puzzle games around, Meteos is a fun-filled adventure that, at heart, is remarkably easy to pick up and play, but so very hard to put down once you're hooked on it.

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