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.

It's Tetris, idk what more there is to say.

Well, okay, I can actually say a lot. I've never played a lot of Tetris but because of this game I've REALLY come to enjoy it. It just tickles my brain in the best way possible. It way it activates my neurons is just beyond description. Beyond that, this game is really pretty! The main campaign is really enjoyable. Some of the visuals and songs are perhaps a bit... cheesy, I guess? But overall the graphics are just super pretty and it's worth playing this game for the sensory experience alone. You would expect that a game that amounts to "Tetris with the beats synced to your drops/moves" would hopefully have good music, and Connected thankfully has excellent music. It's got a healthy mix of many genres, and even has songs that I would consider to be fairly unique and not watered down. There's only one song that I vehemently dislike. It just annoys me.

Multiplayer experience is okay, I guess. I typically manage to find people to play with or against in the various game modes. One criticism I will offer is that this game is NOT popular enough to justify all of the different modes. If you only have a hundred or so players, you really want to make sure that they aren't being further divided into different modes/levels/categories to reduce the matchmaking base even further. This overload of options is strongest in the connected co-op mode, where you have to pick one of five levels of ascending difficulty. There's no way to say "I want to play on any difficulty, I don't care as long as it pairs me with people". This in addition to the fact that the connected mode requires three players means it's difficult to actually get to play the game mode. I will say that when it DOES happen, playing cooperative Tetris is an insanely rewarding experience.

So yeah! This has been a fantastic way to get into Tetris, I enjoy starting my day with just going through the campaign or playing through a few of my favorite songs. Even with the occasional difficulty with finding players in multiplayer, the single player experience alone is still super worth it.

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!