Meteos Preview

“I’m paralysed by fear.”

Confronted with a relentless torrent of blocks cascading onto the top of my rapidly filling screen, I was simply unable to process the overwhelming amount of information being presented to me, as the situation spiralled out of my control. Upon reflection, it wasn’t so much fear as complete indecision: The inability to decide which towering column of blocks to try and get rid of first. This initial response to my first play of Meteos was probably quite a common one. My second response, complete and utter infatuation with the game, is probably a uniform one.

Meteos is the kind of game that could only have ever come out of a Japanese mind. With that singularly Japanese blend of blinding simplicity and total compulsiveness, Meteos is a bizarre, yet compelling, blend of the major gameplay elements of two classics of the action-puzzle genre, Tetris and Zookeeper.

Taking the “Oh my god, stuff is falling” panic element from Tetris, combined with the “arrange blocks into lines of three or more” core mechanic from Zookeeper, Meteos adds in its own unique twist, taking your ability to use the DS’s touch screen interface to the absolute limit.

There is a notional story to the game, namely that some Big Evil Eye in the Sky is raining down meteors onto planets in some fiendish campaign of conquest and destruction, but that’s not really important. The hook is that if you can align these meteors into lines of three or more of the same colour, the turn into rocket boosters, blasting all the blocks resting on top of them up into space. To balance the gameplay and promote a more strategic approach, you can only rearrange the order of the blocks vertically within columns – you cannot move them from column to column. The various colours of block have a fixed amount of thrusting power (set according to the home planet you choose to play as), and each planet has a different gravitational strength, meaning that it’s harder on some planets to remove blocks from the screen. As play continues, the rate of fall of the Meteos gets faster and faster, leading inevitably until breaking point, unless you can fulfil the success criteria for the level first.

There are four different styles of play; the self-explanatory Time Attack mode; the Single Play mode, where you can choose to play against the clock, or play for a certain number of lives; the Homeplanet Mode, where you can try and attempt to beat your high score for each Homeplanet you unlock; finally, there is the Star Trip (or Story) mode, which presents the greatest challenge by pitting you against up to three opponents simultaneously. Each mode has considerable replay value, as Meteos uses the number of blocks you successfully launch as a reward system. New Homeplanets (of which there are sixteen in total), innumerable power-ups and other items, such as sound effects and pieces of music (which can be played back from the Extras menu) and precious metals can be unlocked. All of these rewards feed back into and enhance the gameplay. Once unlocked, power-ups begin to appear in the Star Trip mode, easing your passage, as ludicrously large hammers (for example) bash away whole sections of the stacked blocks in the playing area. The music too isn’t just there as window dressing. The background music responds and alters in pitch and tempo as you create combos, building the sense of energy within the game, as the pace increases. Each Homeplanet is themed, with styles varying from Caribbean calypso to European techno, via the pow-wow of Native America, giving each planet a real sense of identity. As each game builds towards its climactic crescendo, the fusion of the colourful graphics, pulsing music and rhythmic sound effects all stack up into a feeling of sensory overload. It’s easy to be caught up by the music – working yourself into a faster and faster rhythm, your stylus frantically scratching blocks up and down columns to create cascade effects, forming combos which multiply up the thrust power of the blocks, and you link set after set together in quick succession.

Things are equally frantic in multiplayer, where blocks you remove from your own screen are put onto your opponent’s (not unlike in head-to-head Tetris). Meteos allows up to four players to scrap each other over the DS’s wireless facility, meaning games can be almost literally mind-blowing, in both their brevity and hostility. The game moves so fast that it would be absolutely unplayable without the touch screen and stylus. Not even an optical mouse on a high resolution PC screen would be up to scratch. Meteos requires such swiftness of eye, hand and mind that it’s impossible to see how it could be implemented on another platform. If it weren’t for the screen protector, I’d have probably melted my DS’s touch screen by now. It reaches genuine crack-addiction levels of compulsiveness – you’re always thinking after games that you can get that score just a couple of thousand points higher…

With a good variety of game types, the replayability factor, a five-star scaleable difficulty level (from “Brutal” to “Call Amnesty International”), and such a brilliant use of the DS’s touch screen, Meteos is undoubtedly one of the console’s early killer app’s. You should certainly keep an eye out for it, though, unfortunately it hasn’t been announced whether it will see a UK release. An English version has been confirmed in the US for the tail end of June, but as one of the must-have DS titles, an oriental import should certainly be considered, especially as it may not otherwise be seen on these shores before Christmas – if at all. The interface is clean and simple: colour-coded buttons labelled with easily decipherable icons and the odd smattering of English hint texts make navigation around the game’s menus painless enough, even with absolutely no knowledge of Japanese. The credits for the opening movie on the main game menu also feature the most memorable example of in-game Engrish since the immortal “All your base are belong to us.” It’s only a matter of time until “We want you, save our planet!” filters into the collective gaming subconscious. Here at Pro-G, we await the inevitable T-shirts and Flash movie with some impatience.