There are several tetris games available for Windows 8, with 31 results when doing a search for “tetris” but less than half being a true tetris game. I was drawn to its visual style. The name might indicate it strays from the typical gameplay, but it really doesn’t. Lets see how the game play stacks up.
Space Tetris – main screen
Yes it is space tetris due to its background being a view of space. It would be nice if it changed views as you leveled up or something, but it doesn’t. A nice touch though as on this initial screen the blocks you see are falling through space. Nice transitions as well when choosing one of the 4 buttons. The about section of course tells you about the author (which usually would be put in the charms bar). Records shows well records of course, but I’m not sure how I get in there or if I am. There is no ability to enter in your name anywhere. It just shows mostly variations on the developers name.
Gameplay is what is most important here though.
Space Tetris – game screen
Here is where I really felt it worked and deserved a review. It has a nice design here and a feature I have not seen before. It has a box. You can use the box to store you most recent active piece. The current piece will swap places if there is already one stored. It can really help when you get that piece at the wrong time that will mess you up. You can turn off the shadow thankfully as playing with it, throws me off for some reason. The controls are pretty good, although I found side to side with the arrow keys it moved too quickly and at times I had a difficult time getting the piece placed correctly.
Space Tetris – tutorial
Speaking about controls, it shows you a very nice tutorial (which you can also turn off) before you begin the game. It has a concise way of representing touch controls, which I cannot test. Seeing how much space they take up, probably could have made it bigger or explained the “box” concept since some, like me, may not have seen it before.
Space Tetris – pause screen
Charms
Since it is a game it doesn’t really use the charms. It has a settings (and the aforementioned “about) within the app itself instead of the charm. It doesn’t bother me in this case, though typically I prefer an app to use the charms as that is what they are there for. Settings provides an option to turn on/off the tutorial and the “Ghost” block, plus you can choose English(default) or Portuguese languages. It may have been a glitch but I saw Portuguese on a menu after trying Portuguese and going back to English again.
Snap
It supports the one-third snapped view! That is wonderful, and the keyboard worked fine as long as you didn’t mess with whatever was showing in the main view. I don’t think I’d use it snapped, but some might find a reason for it, handy pause button helps.
Tile
It provides just a small tile with nothing live about it, not needed either.
Summary
While the controls are a bit too loose and it would be a nice to provide a graphical indication for level change or even when you get rid of lines somehow, it is worthwhile download if you need your tetris fix.
Rating
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Category: Games > Puzzle |
Download size: 1.18 MB |
Age: 3+ |
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Publisher: Danilo |
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Oh yay! Tetris with a space background! What a moronic blog. Gives a plain tetris clone good points even though it has no originallity and lacks basic windows features. Who made this idiot an authority on windows apps anyways? After reading a bunch of his other reviews I see no consistency in his reports, rampant subjective qualifiers that are applied whenever he feels the need to use them and insensible ommission of actual objective qualities that should be included for each and every app. I think this self-important boob needs to stop pretending that he actually knows something and filling the internet with his craptastic reviews.
Thank you for providing an alternative view to my reviews. If you can do better, please do. I do not claim to be an authority on the matter, I just thought I’d offer an opinion on apps which you clearly disagree with. I value you opinion even if it is loaded with unnecessary put-downs.
Well that’s what you deserve if you use a magic 8 ball to determine a score for an app. You really should try and educate yourself a bit more about what is innovative or creative and what is simply a poor copy of an 1984 game with a small trick. If you want to actually contribute something useful then stop giving glowing reviews to ports, blog readers, and games that ,even if they are still fun after 29 years, should be implemented to perfection by now or at least done in a manner that fully conforms to the metro UI. Perhaps if you read up on a tiny bit of development you would figure out that the majority of the stuff you consider ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ is just repackaged work that someone else did. In essence, stop contributing to the clogging of the windows store. There is so much crud in there already you should be doing your best to only pull out things that differentiate Windows 8 from the other marketplaces. Otherwise you are just cluttering up the internet.
Thank you again. I am certainly can always improve. I do try to stay away from “junk” apps, there have been precious few recently that I felt deserved attention. I do not have to explain myself but this is something I do on the side, for fun, and therefore do not have time to look through the store to find and test quality apps. I have to go with ones I find interesting or think others might enjoy within my scope of knowledge (I don’t review finance or travel for instead since not really thing).
In my searches, I have not found many reviews such as mine available and I know several developers have contacted me who appreciate my review of their app. I certainly don’t expect to please everyone, and clearly you are not happy with my contribution to the blogosphere, but that is how it goes.
Feel free to email me with apps you consider worthwhile to review and I can promise I will do what I can to review them (as previous explained).