"Warning: Reading may cause sudden urge to grab $50CND and run to Wal*Mart."

"Right, over here's a fiver. Connect that and...argh! There's a critical over on the left! Fix that with a vertical, hey, it made an L! Drat, a Speeder Lock popped up, I'll have to get rid of that before it...wow, a rare metal just plowed through it! Get that off the ground before the Super Rocket kicks in..."

You have just witnessed the thoughts of a Meteos player. Yes, the game looks complicated. Yes, it involves falling blocks. And no, it's not a Tetris clone.

A puzzle game with a story. Yes, it's an odd breed. The story goes like this: the planet Meteo is sending infinite numbers of coloured blocks out to other planets, which are overwhelmed and are destroyed. Luckily, it's discovered how to defend against the threat, and once enough Meteos (the blocks) have been collected, a warship is built to go to Meteo to defeat it. The story fits really well with the game, and the only plot hole is that during the game, you destroy other planets on the way to Meteo. Why destroy planets you're trying to save? A mystery. On the plus side, depending on which story mode you take, there are different endings.

Story: 9/10 (5% of True Total)

Meteos doesn't use the DS's 3D engine. Instead, you see flat pictures of everything, while the cutscenes are in prerendered movie format. This is not a bad things at all. Each planet has a different set of Meteos, which is to say a Fire Meteo may look like a red circle with a dot in it on one planet, and a cube with an animated triangle on another. The animations of each alien are well done and suit the atmosphere. The only problem with the graffics is that, with huge amounts of animated blocks on-screen, the framerate can suffer. This is understandable yet annoying.

Graphics: 9/10 (10% of True Total)

The sound is better than the graphics. The menu and opening pieces sound like something right out of a movie, which is impressive and give the game an epic scale. During gameplay, the sound is less traditional. A backbeat constantly plays, speeding itself up when it decides you should be playing a bit more frantically. For every boost you make, a succession of musical notes is heard, very similar to creating your own concert. Unlike the Meteos tilesets, sound sets are 100% unique to each planet: Jeljel sounds like a haunted house, Oleana features an island beat, and Firim is like a rock concert - complete with the audience screaming as a huge stack falls to the ground!

Sound: 10/10 (10% of True Total)

It's easy to control the game. You simply shift the DS's stylus up and down the touchscreen, moving Meteos with it. The blocks follow the stylus's exact speed. Tapping an item will cause it to start the countdown - tapping it again will cause it to activate early. Also, in the menu screens, you can use the stylus to drag the options around! The only problem with the controls is that you can sometimes cheaply "scribble" the stylus all over the screen, mabe saving you from a Game Over - and the blocks can be hard to pinpoint at times.

Controls: 9/10 (20% of True Total)

The gameplay is the big time. Blocks are falling onto the lower screen. You drag them up and down, trying to match 3 or more of the same type. When you do, they become rockets and boost up everything on top of them, hopefully off to the top screen and out of your field. The catch is, gravity affects how high a stack can rise before running out of thrust, and once it does, it comes back to the ground and rests for a few seconds before the rockets revert to normal Meteos. There's many techniques for increasing thrust, such as creating matches in hovering stacks and "flicking" Meteos upwards. But be careful, as the game is usually played against an opponent. Throwing blocks off your screen causes them to appear on your opponent's screen as fused blocks, which clutter up the field and cause more trouble as they revert. Each planet brings its own style to the gameplay as well. For example, on Brabbit, stacks rise and fall verrrry slowly. On Wiral, only flicking gives a real boost to momentum. And on Gravitas, there's so much gravity that you have to make two matches before anything moves! As if that wasn't variety enough, items come into the game, destroying Meteos in random or pre-determined patterns, freezing your ability to control the speed of falling Meteos, and converting Meteos into rockets for a free launch. And here's the kicker: everything you send off the screen is put in the bank, and when you want to, you can take out your launched Meteos and use then to fuse (unlock) new planets, items, sound sets, and Rare Metals! Clearly, the gameplay is huge.

Gameplay: 10/10 (20% of True Total)

This game is definately very fun. Fun to launch Meteos, fun to blow up opponents, fun to Super Rocket the whole bottom row and watch your whole screen get sent to that one guy you hate...it's all fun. Unless you have to unlock something, in which came it becomes somewhat of a chore.

Fun: 9/10 (7% of True Total)

The difficulty of the game is very well adjusted. You can set the speed of Meteos from Simple to Brutally Hard and the computer opponents from Weak to Overwhelming. Some of the missions in Branch Mode are very hard in any case, but overall this game suits all skill levels.

Difficulty: 8/10 (7% of True Total)

In terms of length, the game is hard to classify. Certainly it takes only a short time to complete a story mode, but you can theoretically set a match to play forever. Because of this possible variation, I gave it a 10.

Length: 10/10 (7% of True Total)

You will rarely want to put this game down. It's very highly addictive. There's not only a huge amount of stuff to unlock, but it takes a very long time to unlock it all. Then, there's VS. mode to consider. After all that, it's still possible to get bored of the game, but you won't put it down for quite a while.

Replayibility: 9/10 (7% of True Total)

The aforementioned VS. mode is very powerful. The game supports both multi-card and single-card modes, although the options are very limited in the latter. When everyone has a card, they can set their own planet and item frequencies, their teams, and then duke it out in a battle that will most likely earn certain gestures. Not from me, of course. I just send full screens.

Multiplayer: 10/10 (7% of True Total)

Rent Or Buy?: Buy. Buybuybuy. I'm serious. Unless you're on March Break, have insomnia, can eat/drink with only one hand, and don't mind wearing diapers, you will never get this game worn out in a rental. Buy it. You won't regret it.

Subtotal: 93%

True Total: 93.7%

Rounded True Total: 9/10

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 03/08/06