I recently picked up a bunch of DS games that I've missed, one of them being Meteos. As a big fan of puzzle games, I heard many good things about it. Mostly comparisons to Tetris, or Lumines which was released shortly before. It was hailed as THE action puzzler for the system and with Masahiro Sakurai being the designer, I honestly had high expectations. When you boot it up, you're greeted with a ridiculously epic CGI sequence. Calm down already, it's a puzzle game. To be honest I like my puzzle games abstract, no need for a story (no matter how ridiculous), and rather slick and unicolored surfaces than these mushy colored blocks from the title logo. But I understand, visual identity is important, and since Lumines came right before, Meteos had to go another (uglier) way. At least the little alien creatures are cute and (hooray!) abstract.
If you might have forgotten that Sakurai designed this game, then comes a visual reminder: the menues. You can even push around the icons. Fun! So after clicking every button once, and wiggling them around even more, you find that you can spend your future meteos-earnings on a whole bunch of goodies, like soundfiles, items, and planets [Fusion], seeing every move and misstep you make painfully recorded [Extras], a reminder that no one around you is playing NDS anymore [Wireless] and then - ah! - the meat of the game [Meteos]. The Tutorial explains you the gist of the game, much better than I could.
I investend about five or six hours into the game but I'm not fully sure about it already. It's super addicting, that's for sure. But some small things bother me, maybe you can help me with that. I don't really understand how every planet works. I like that there is a change to gameplay, many of the planets feel distinct, yet others... I don't know. I mean, I can figure out pretty quickly when it's best to kickstart a stack of meteos with a vertical line, of if you have to fire twice to shoot them off. But there are so many so-so planets, where I don't really know if I found the right strategy to approach them. I'll give it some more time, but maybe I'm missing something. I'm sometimes getting frustrated with slow-falling booster blocks. Like when I ligned up a combo, just waiting for the thing to fall and the lines to connect, only to fail shortly before it clicks, since there's no way of bringing down the rocks quicker. Also, in some levels they fall down too quickly, which makes it hard to correctly hit the right block, when the whole stack is crashing down. Same problem with accuracy in the credit level. The blocks are just a tad too small to hit reliably, especially when they're moving. Some of the instructions from the challenge level are also a bit vague: "lauch 30 water meteos", okay does that mean to ignite them, or to send them off flying?
I'll share some more thought the more I play, but please tell my about your experiences with the game! I'm being nit-picky, but I really enjoy my time with it so far. Not sure if I return to it in the way I return to Tetris or Tetris Attack, but that's something only time will tell. And finally I get where those X and + bombs from Smash are from!
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