Game Review: Tetris: Axis

Billy O'Keefe - Mclatchy -Tribune News Service

For: Nintendo 3DS

From: Nintendo

ESRB rating: Everyone

Price: $30

It's pretty hard to screw up "Tetris" at this point, and no one has a better track record with the brand than Nintendo.

Sure enough, if all you desire is some traditional "Tetris," you'll find it in "Tetris: Axis" - same shapes, scoring system, objective and all.

And if you want a dozen-plus other variations of "Tetris," ranging from tweaks on the original formula to bizarre experiments that go off the deep end, good news: You'll find those here as well.

For its part, and via a really clumsy menu interface, "Axis" positions two modes - traditional Marathon and Fever - as its main pillars. Marathon needs no introduction, but Fever feels like the "Tetris" equivalent to what "Pac-Man Championship Edition" was to "Pac-Man." There's a time limit, and you're mostly playing traditional "Tetris." But configurable power-ups change the way the board behaves when you clear them as part of a line, and you'll want to clear lines of a single color if you want to activate color mode and score some serious points.

Those factors, combined with the ticking clock, make Fever a vastly different game despite its resemblance to traditional "Tetris." The short length of a typical game also makes it entirely too easy to try one more time for a higher score. That's in stark contrast to Marathon mode, which can go on for more than an hour if you're good, and if one alternative mode had to stand out above the rest, Nintendo picked exactly the right one.

Incidentally, though "Axis" supports eight-player online competitive play, only a few modes - Fever among them - receive online leaderboard support, and you have to upload your score manually. Better than nothing, but hardly ideal.

Like most modern "Tetris" games, "Axis" also supports battle play against the computer or friends (eight players, locally or online). Tweaked modes like Survival (smaller grid that's filling from the bottom as well as top), Master (pieces fall at top speed right from the start) and Sprint (fill 40 lines as quickly as possible) also feature traditional "Tetris" play with small twists.

And then there's the stuff that's just weird. Stage Racer Plus stars you as a single piece and tasks you with falling through as much of an obstacle course as you can without getting caught. Fit, meanwhile, shifts to a top-down perspective and tasks you with filling square grids, Tanagrams style, before time expires. In Jigsaw, you're dropping shapes in order to complete a jigsaw puzzle or match an arrangement on the second screen, while Shadow Wide asks you to assemble objects by quickly filling in their shadows with pieces and doing so with minimal spillage outside the shadow boundaries.

But "Axis" really lets the crazy flag fly when incorporating the 3DS' augmented reality capabilities, which allow the system to project a "Tetris" grid on any flat surface in your real world. AR Marathon plays like traditional "Tetris," except with a much smaller grid and a special block that, when part of a cleared line, clears the rest of the grid as well. The (literal) twist is that whenever this happens, the grid rotates its axis, which means you need to move the system's camera in kind if you want to view the grid from the front.

The ingenuous AR Climber, meanwhile, tasks you with cobbling falling pieces into a continuous platform that allows a little running man to scale an endless circling staircase up a tower. As he circles the AR tower, so must you, so don't even think of sitting down while playing this if you want to do well. Until someone dreams up a Kinect "Tetris" game, this is the best (if dizziest) "Tetris"-induced workout you'll ever have.

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