Acid Drop

"This game could’ve been half-decent, but instead is proof that all-nighters are bad."

Tetris is a great puzzle game that has predecessors and spawn that follow its glory. Some games follow Tetris as a right-hand man to it, such as Dr. Mario. This game falls in the cheap botched spawn that nobody cares about, and for good reason.

The concept of Acid Drop is similar to Tetris, and coincidentally, probably the only thing the game has going for it. A line of 3 blocks will drop onto the playing field in different colors, and you have to line up a set of 3 either vertically or horizontally. You can move the stick up to have it rotate, and press the fire button to change the order of the blocks. Don't wait for combos though, as they don't happen. You can make preparations for a 10 hit combo, get the first one, and have it stop even though you have 3 lined up. This brings me to the first problem, the colors. Not only are the colors painful to look at, but they obviously wanted to increase the difficulty of the game, so they made the colors blue, yellow, goldenrod, pink, and a very slightly darker shade of pink or purple or something. This makes it very confusing to get matches, and makes the game no fun very quickly.

Of course, there are some other good parts to this game. For example, when you reach a certain number of points, a big yellow or white block comes down and takes off part of the screen, making your life easier again for a few seconds. That's really about it for anything fun. I guess the controls are simple enough after a while as well, but the fact that you can't tell the colors apart makes it really hard to do much of anything with this game.

Besides the gameplay, there are boatloads of things that are also wrong with this game. First off, the music is terrible. Now, I can understand that the sound cards aren't very good. So, what the creators (though I think it's actually one creator working a 24-hour shift who made this game) should've done is make the sound a LITTLE more tolerable or gotten rid of it completely. I‘ve never heard classical music ever botched like that. Even I've never played that bad, and I'm not exactly musical. There's also the fact that there's really nothing else to do besides try and beat it on level 2 (or 9), as there are no other modes. Perhaps it's better that way, though.

In conclusion, I could not rate it a 1 out 10 due to its similarities with Tetris. You can see a glimmer of hope in this game thanks to the blocks' versatility and the big block helping you out. Unfortunately, the people at Salu went wrong in just about every way. You don't make colors almost the same, give us terrible music, and except us to enjoy the game. It's not going to happen. If a game is going to be like Tetris, it at least has to have a quarter of the enjoyability, and this game did not even come close. Replayability is practically negative, and for good reasons, the reasons being everything I've stated so many times.
Just do yourself a favor and stay away from this game unless you like torturing yourself.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 01/18/05