Wetrix

"It’s all washed up!"

OPENING STATEMENT
Wetrix is a little Scottish developer called Zed Two’s take on the Tetris phenomenon. (Ironically, published by the now-defunct Ocean. Water, ‘Wet’rix, Ocean, get it?) Apparently, they thought it was like instant pudding. Just add water, and it is ready. Apparently, they were misinformed.

GAMEPLAY--2
“Just add water.” Those three words have been the savior of working parents, needing a quick meal between dragging the kids off to their activities. If it worked for the parents of the developers at Zed Two, it should hold true to everything! Their mommies were never wrong! When they sent them to school with umbrellas it never failed: it rained! They took Tetris, added water, and ended up with your sixth grade Home Economics project. Yes, just adding water game them gameplay. It just happened to be crappy gameplay. Adding think of it as adding water to a pile of dirt. It just creates a bigger mess for you to clean up.

Yes, this is truly Tetris after ‘just adding water.’ You need to take blocks dropping out of the sky, and you are required to build up walls, to hold the water in once the rains begin to fall. I think they should use this method in Bangladesh during the monsoons. Other objects fall from the sky, like a fireball to dissolve some water on the table, and a bomb to drill a hole through the level. Bombs are bad, and fireballs are good. You want all of the water to never leave the boxed area. Water falling through a hole at the bottom is equivalent to water flowing over the sides of the levee in Zed Two’s mind, so keep that in mind. There are options and bells and whistles aplenty. But the gameplay is missing an element. (Not Hydrogen or Oxygen, mind you.) It’s trying to do too much with too little, or else it is trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. Or something like that.

GRAPHICS--8
The fact that the game plays horrible is not to deny that it looks fantastic.The colors of the ‘earth’ in each level are more psychedelic than those in a disco straight from 1978. I swear, the ground looks like some day-glow Zubaz! (Remember Zubaz?) Brightly colored, seemingly abstract, fluorescent patterns dot the oceany landscape. Yes, they certainly add to the mysterious aura that flows through the pores of Wetrix.

The water itself looks fairly good, partially because Zed Two did not have to worry about making realistic waves, the biggest problem with water in video games. In fact, the only thing that Zed Two and Ocean made waves with in Wetrix is how bad a Tetris clone can actually be. The fireball effects are nice, but we all know that fire and water do not mix, and sadly that was true for the effects as well. It made me weep big, giant tears of sadness.

My only problem with the graphics in Wetrix are the bland, monochromatic backgrounds. When everything else about the game is so bright and colorful (even the fireball effects and such are over-the-top, like Mount Everest compared to sea level), these backgrounds seem very out of place. I do realize that the intent of Ocean and Zed Two was to make the backgrounds boring so they do not detract from the gameplay, but instead, the distract you from the game by being so boring. You know what I mean.

MUSIC--1
SOUND--3
“Don’t go chasing waterfalls;
Just stick to the rivers and the lakes like you’re used to.”

TLC should have provided the songs for Wetrix. The futuristic, computer-generated, hydro-body filled music video would have been more fun to watch than actually playing this game anyway. Instead, we have the pleasure of listening to synthesizer/techno garbage that you could surpass in quality of composition on a keyboard that you found in the gutter with rainwater and dead leaves. Yes, Zed Two aimed low, so they could not be disappointed with the music in Wetrix. And I could have forgiven this if the rest of the game was high quality stuff. But, it is not, so it is almost as unforgivable as the mutiny aboard the H. M. S. Bounty.

The sound effects are better, yes. But that hardly prevents them from being horribly repetitive, low in number, and you wishing to be able to submerge them in water to never have the misfortune of listening to them again. Drown the sound effects people at Ocean and Zed Two! Only they could be so uncreative with sounds that they could have had a field day with! Come on. They could not even think of any good noises for a fireball! Throw them in a mud puddle!

CONTROLS--2
The human body is made up of seventy percent water. Seventy percent of the earth’s surface is covered in water. More than seventy percent of the controls in Wetrix are useless. The configuration is worse than I ever could have imagined. (Of course, then, when I was imagining, I was still a novice in the puzzle genre, sticking with Tetris and its various companions, and little else. Since then I have branched out to discover the sunny beaches of the puzzle genre.) Changing the directions of the blocks is like swimming against a tsunami, and it is such a vital part of building the damn dams to keep the water contained. But, you are fighting the controls all along, just like when you are fighting that fifteen pound Northern Pike. On top of it all, the game takes a little while to register your commands, kind of like yourself when the officer comes up asking to see your boat license. The end result is disastrous, like that infamous tidal wave striking Hilo all over again.

FUN--1
Wetrix is truly the sum of all of its parts. In other words, I have a little equation for you: Quality Gameplay + Good Graphics + Enjoyable Audio + Workable Control + Even Challenge + Lots of Replay Value = Fun. They prove this equation true by proving the converse: Crappy Gameplay + Meaningless Eye Candy + Awful Audio + Suicide-inducing Control + Spazzy Challenge + No Replay Value = No Fun.That has been your daily math lesson. Please return to adding two plus two. Hopefully you get four, like the number of oceans there are in the world. (I am still quite pleased that there are not four Oceans, the company, to bring us awful games like this.)

Yes, I hate math as much as you, if not three or four times as much as you. Almost as much as the Exxon Valdez disaster. But using the hated algebraic equations got my point across nicely, did it not? A game can simply not be fun if everything about it is poorly done, and that fits Wetrix to a ‘T.’ (A ‘T’ for a watered-down Tetris clone, that is.) I cannot think of any better way to put it than putting six or seven bricks in an wet suit without an air tank would be more fun than ever playing Wetrix again.

CHALLENGE--HIGH
The control added to a horribly thought-out difficulty curve makes Wetrix impossible to play. Instead of making the first few levels easy, so you can get the hang of the game, Zed Two decided to start you off with what would be the equivalent of about the thirty-fifth stage in Tetris Attack. In other words, watch out. It took me about five hours to beat the first level, and I play lots of puzzle games. That is really not a good sign. And, in my aforementioned statement, the lack of any control worth its weight in air just makes the game more difficult.

REPLAY VALUE--LOW
The horrible control seals the deal for me. I will never play play Wetrix again, not unless you pay me the amount of money equivalent to pieces of space junk that NASA drops in the Atlantic each year and claims that they were lost in space. (That is quite a few billion my friends.) Then, and only then, would I even consider picking up my controller and playing this horrible, awful game. Throw it in the polluted Ohio River and let it disintegrate in the acidic waters!

PROS
*Some nice color choices in the graphics.
*The fireball effects are nicely done.
*You getting to read all of my delightful water-based puns.

CONS
*You will wish your ears got bitten off by a shark to save you from the horrors of the audio.
*The controls are a sinking ship.
*More frustrating then being lost adrift in the Caribbean Sea for three weeks.

CLOSING STATEMENT
In the river of time, Wetrix will be one of those games that travels through some rapids, and then plunges over a waterfall into a ravine. Not even if I owned all of the seven seas, and they were turned to gold, would I be tempted by Neptune to play Wetrix again. The game is just all wet.

By the way, if you got all of my water related puns in this review, bake yourself a nice chocolate chip cookie. Maybe the cocoa beans sailed across the Gulf of Mexico to reach your oven.

OVERALL--2

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 10/26/01, Updated 10/26/01