Let me make one thing clear, I’ve never played a battle royale game. Yes, I know its surprising that I’ve gotten this far in my career and yet I refuse to play the most popular gaming genre out there. To that I say, so what? Anyway, I ended up putting time into the ARIKA developed Tetris “battle royale” game called Tetris 99 and oh boy if all battle royale games are this frustratingly addictive then I have probably been missing out on some serious fun.
Tetris 99 is, well, it’s Tetris against 99 other players. Throughout the match, players will connect to your game and send over extra blocks for you to deal with. Now, you can get rid of those blocks by keeping your Tetris lines low, but if you don’t handle them in time then blocks will appear under your Tetris board. The game also allows you to target other players and change whether you’re trying to attack or get badges with the line scores that you get.
Being an old school Tetris player, I quickly learned that getting Tetris is not really required in a versus game like this because keeping your lines low is all that matters. So after a few matches, I was battle royal-ing my way to victory (or at least the top 10). Throughout the game, as players get KOed the game and music get faster until there is only one victor.
Considering I was doing so well at this battle royal game, I figured that I would be naturally good at all battle royal games. So without hesitation, I downloaded the most popular battle royal game around, Fortnite. After downloading the game via the Epic Games store (I tried looking in the Steam store), I was ready to go! I felt a little better after I figured out that you were supposed to choose when to jump out of the flying bus, but that’s beside the point. I ended up dying in about 5 minutes so there was no chicken dinner for me with this game.
That all doesn’t matter though because I’m finally a part of the battle royal community through the power of Tetris. Tetris 99 is fun, but it’s still only Tetris. There’s some skill to this new fighting style, but sometimes you just get lucky and no one attacks you for a while so you can get pretty far even if you aren’t doing so hot. There’s plenty of replayability here, but I would like to see more controller options available so that I could map actions to buttons.
All in all, Tetris 99 is shaping up to be a good time. Yes, it’s still only Tetris, but I think that’s okay!
[Update] I just found out that it’s “battle royale”, I’ve since retired from this genre.
