Easily the best Tetris game ever made, no questions asked. Visuals, music, super tight and responsive gameplay, gamemode variety, multiplayer modes, EVERYTHING is just right.

Took me almost 100 hours to 100% and all of it was fun (save for maybe the final bit of grinding for player level 100 but hey, no game is perfect).


Okay so for starters, this is a Mizuguchi game. Director/producer of Lumines/Meteos fame, along with having worked on other similarly musical games like Space Channel and Child of Eden.
It shows..

Everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING, in this game is tied to the music, in Lumines fashion. All your gameplay movements snappily add dynamic beats that perfectly time to the music (by subtly delaying sound cues until the next quarter-beat comes), which combined with the silky smooth controls and framerate make the gameplay extremely satisfying. Every second of gameplay is absolute visual and audio bliss, bombarding you with gorgeous backgrounds and catchy music that perfectly times with all your actions.

And the new Zone mechanic is super satisfying to use, too. Essentially a recharging meter that fills up with line clears, that allows you to completely freeze time temporarily so you can chain as many line clears together all at once before it unfreezes, giving MASSIVE point payoffs (or massive attacks, if you're playing versus against another player). Cool and satisfying in singleplayer, a whole other mechanical layer in multiplayer.


The main "campaign"/Journey mode is a wonderful little package, with three different difficulties with wildly different experiences, along with the ranking system already giving a solid bit of replayability just for that.

But then you have all the Effect modes (the arcade-y sidemodes that are what you'd actually expect from a Tetris game), with a billion different modes to play in four different categories, along with unique extra backgrounds/songs/"skins" you can play them in. All of them also tying music and visuals to your gameplay, of course.

Everything you'd expect is there; marathon, endless modes, sprint/score attack, along with a bunch of more out-there stuff like the "mystery"-category modes which add a bunch of weird rules and obstacles for you to deal with, and modes that help you practice execution like Full Clear which lets you try advanced flipping through gaps (on top of being fun themselves, obviously).

And because I need to mention it specifically, a later update added Classic Score Attack which straight up follows NES rules, as faithfully as one could possibly imagine, with gorgeous visuals and remixed music, all the way down to letting you pick between 60hz/50hz gameplay speed to match whichever you're used to playing, if you've played the original.

Then there's the multiplayer modes!
A couple different battle modes, plus the Connected co-op/boss attack mode, which is an EXTREMELY cool idea. I do wish there was a bit more to it (only 5 stages), but what is there is very cool. Essentially three players working together to fight a boss, charging their zone meter to "conjoin" their boards into one for a massive attack directed specifically at the boss' board.


Anyway yeah, I've yapped on a lot, but this is absolutely worth it, especially if you're a Tetris fan already. It's easily one of if not the best in the entire series. And it goes on sale extremely often, on top of already being cheap baseline.
You ABSOLUTELY should do yourself a favor and play it at some point.

I went on a Tetris binge recently after never having interest in it before. I played through several classics on my retro handhelds, before arriving at this on my Steam Deck. It's more Tetris, and it's more beautiful than ever.

You probably already know if you will like it or not, so if you're unsure, go play an older title or Apotris. And if you still crave more, pick this up, you won't regret it!

Did not like Tetris as much, but after playing this, I can't get over how good it is and how amazing the soundtrack is.