TETRIS review

TETRIS for iPhone and iPad has been redesigned and repurposed by EA, allowing them to try out the freemium genre of mobile games, bringing with it a few unfamiliar paid features. The newly released version of TETRIS tracks your lifetime stats for the game and now requires a membership fee ($2.99 monthly or $29.99 annually) if you want all of its features. You’re also able to buy T-Coins via in-app purchases.

There is also a new gameplay mode called one-touch where you aim and tap on the landing spot of the falling brick, instead of tapping to rotate them. This is to avoid having to rotate the block and missing the column where you want your block landing.

TETRIS is a classic puzzle video game which has been available in one format or another since its original designer, Alexey Pajitnov, released it in the Soviet Union in 1984. Porting the popular TETRIS brand for usage on cell phones and other similar devices has been extremely popular, as over 100 million copies of the application have been purchased, besting the approximately 70 million in sales that every other version of TETRIS combined has made.

One of the best things about TETRIS is that it does not require a high level of skill to play, at least in the initial stages. By taking blocks, known as Tetriminos, and flipping them to fit into the correct spaces players can clear each round and move onto the next. TETRIS has long been a gaming experience that both newcomers and veteran players have been able to embrace and through it’s almost addictive gameplay it has helped to convert millions of people from casual gamers into regular gamers.

TETRIS was also the first video game to be considered good for brain activity; Dr. Richard Haier and Dr. Emily Holmes have shown in two independent studies that playing TETRIS boosts cognitive functions and has the ability to reduce traumatic memories.

Take all that success, and simplicity, and throw it out of the window with this latest release of TETRIS on the iPhone. You have to join some kind of a club to play TETRIS? Why is EA destroying a timeless classic this way? Not only that but the entire coin system is absurd and doesn’t fit TETRIS. And finally, removing the old $5 TETRIS game from the App Store is a pretty strange decision, considering a ton of customers have already purchased that app.

Overall, this iOS version of TETRIS is nice to look at but a step in the wrong direction for EA and their Mobile team.