"This game is the huge steak the hungry DS owner has been waiting for."

And anyone who's already played this game enough knows exactly why I used that particular metaphor. ;)

Meteos is a game which is both easy and difficult to compare to other games. True, it's a puzzle game, but it's so unique in its execution that it is unlike any other game on the market. It could be called "The World's Fastest-Paced Meteor-Based Designed-Around-A-Multiplayer-Concept Puzzle Game," or it could be called "The Sideways Amphetamine-High Touchscreen Love-Child of Tetris Attack and [Insert Fighting Game Here]," or maybe it could be called "I Went To Thirty-Something Different Rock-Launching Planets And All I Got Was This Stupid Video Game." Thank goodness the designers went with "Meteos" instead, leaving us with something that is both easier to pronounce and easier to refer friends and potential buyers to.

At any rate, the basic mechanic of Meteos is multiplayer-based. The idea is that each player has a "home planet" (i.e. stage) which they are trying to keep free of "meteos" (i.e. blocks) while trying to fill up their opponents' planets with meteos to force them into a "planet nova" (i.e. make them lose). Meteos keep piling up at increasing rates, and to get them off your screen, you have to swap them vertically to align them into rows or columns of 3 or more, after which they ignite and blast off towards the top of the screen, taking everything on top of them with them. Of course, sometimes there are too many blocks on top weighing the launching blocks down, so you have to make some extra matches to "boost" the mass so it leaves your screen.

And therein lies the game's genius. In most competitive puzzle games, you are rewarded for destroying stuff, and the more the merrier. In Meteos, the blocks you match in threes, fours, and fives turn gray, and any gray blocks you launch only count as one-third of a block each in terms of raw attack power, whereas the non-matched stuff you launch is worth its face value. In other words, Meteos rewards you not for what you destroy, but rather for what you do not destroy, and that's what makes it so unique. It uses a concept which is so simple, yet which has gone underutilized up till now, and it's a complete breath of fresh air in the block-matching game department.

There are two other things which set this game apart from other games in the genre. First of all, every single planet is completely different, in both the types and proportions of meteos that appear and in their individual handling of the game physics, not to mention audiovisual presentation. Basically, every planet is more or less unique in its presentation of the game mechanics, and as such a different strategy is required to use each one to its fullest potential. For example, some planets have wider playfields than others and therefore require you to keep track of more stuff at once; on some planets the gravity is more or less powerful, so you need to match more blocks or fewer blocks to actually get an attack across; on some planets, launches and boosts are more or less powerful; on some planets, horizontal lines may be more effective for launching meteos than vertical ones, or vice versa. And some planets are just plain weird: there are a couple planets where gravity doesn't make falling things accelerate (things just go up and then come down with the same constant velocity), and on some planets, some boosts are always powerful enough to launch any size stack straight off the screen! This level of variety can be compared to most fighting games and their selection of characters, where every character is at least a little bit different and requires a different tactic or mindset to utilize well.

The other thing which makes Meteos Meteos is that every meteo you launch off the screen gets tracked by the game, and outside of normal play you can use them to "fuse" (i.e. unlock) new planets, new items to use, and sound sets to listen to in the sound test. This is where part of the replay value comes in, in that it will take ages to get the requirements for every unlockable, and this is also where the different planets become necessary, since different types of meteos appear on different planets, and you therefore need to play different planets in order to unlock everything.

In terms of game modes, there are plenty of those too. Besides the multiplayer and vs. CPU modes, which allow you to play with either time or stock limits, there are three different single-player campaign modes with a bunch of different endings to discover, and there are also modes where the goal is to score high in a time limit or launch a certain number of meteos as quickly as possible. And in Deluge mode, you pick a planet and play until you fail, both to beat your previous score and to rack up more meteos towards your total. Meteos also supports single-card multiplayer, although it's of course rather limited, and you can beam a temporary demo to anyone else with a DS, which they can then play until they turn off the power. (Unfortunately, you can't play multiplayer with a demo unless you are also running the demo, but then again that's what the single-card multiplayer option is for.) Just bear in mind that unless you decide to artificially stretch a game out with a huge stock or time limit, individual games of Meteos have a tendency to be very short, which is good for "pick-up-and-play" value but isn't so good for killing long periods of time.

Meteos is basically chock-full of variety and replay value, and it makes a solid addition to any DS owner's collection. Just make sure all your friends buy copies too, if you really want the full multiplayer experience.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 07/07/05