Tetris Effect

didn't think tetris would ever make me tear up

It's Tetris, but as an OLED tv tech demo. What more could you want.

It's just Tetris but as a weirdly kind of spiritual experience with overly stimulating backgrounds and a fantastic electronic soundtrack, what more can you say?

I'd look elsewhere if you want an entry purely for competitive play but as a single player, casual experience it's more than worth it to give it a shot.

With the amount of hype and praise that Tetris Effect has received, you'd imagine that it's a game that flips Tetris and revolutionizes the game or something. Well it absolutely doesn't, it's still the same good old Tetris. However this might be the definitive version of Tetris and it certainly feels complete.

So "Effect" is essentially visual and audio effects additions. While you are playing your regular Tetris game, the background has these 3D hypnotic visuals full of colors and an electronic soundtrack to match it. Better yet as you get some lines in and the speed of the falling blocks progress, the background and music will adapt to that in a rather smooth and fluid transition. It does make playing Tetris like an experience, but in the end you are still playing Tetris which is of course a classic game.

The "Connected" Xbox port is essentially just an addition of some multiplayer mode, it pairs you with 2 other players and you have to defeat a boss AI (there's also a mode where a player can assume the role of the boss). At some point your 3 grids become connected and you have to make the most lines together which will then add some trouble to the grid of the boss. It's a pretty fun concept, but also relies on the quality of your teammates as those are chosen randomly. The other multiplayer modes are more in the classic Tetris sense, these feature online ranking so you will be paired with players of your same skill level.

The rating of the game is solely dependent on how much you want to play Tetris in 2020. For myself I've been playing the game since the original NES release, and I've had my fair share of it over the last 30 years in its multiple iterations. This version is great and it definitely does Tetris justice, it's probably the best version available for it too. But it's just yeah I've played this game a whole lot before and it hasn't changed that much, so I can't say that it's the game of the year or anything like that.