Meteos Reader Review

Like many a puzzle game before it Meteos is about removing coloured blocks from a screen in as efficient a manner as possible. These blocks descend towards the bottom of the screen and nestle snugly against each other awaiting the gentle caress of your stylus. In Meteos you use your stylus to move blocks as far as you like within a stack but you are restricted to vertical moment only. The intention when moving the blocks is to line up 3 or more of the same type of block into a horizontal or vertical line. Should you do this the blocks will ignite and the stack will ascend the screen taking all those blocks above your ignition with it. These blocks will then slowly (or quickly depending on the gravity of the planet where you are playing) descend back down at which point the multiple strategies available come in to play. I won't actually spoil them for you at this point because I had a lot of fun working them out but lets just say the larger the stack of Meteos you end up manipulating the better.

There are a multitude of game modes available and all of them have a high score which you will spend endless hours trying to beat. The 2 minute mode is my particular weapon of choice and I've managed to get just short of 175k but I know I can beat that with a cooler head and a pointier stylus.

That score of 175k could in no way have been achieved with a technique known as "scribbling" which is the practice of frantically rubbing the stylus all over the screen in the hope of setting off a random ignition and retreiving a bad situation. People seem to think this is a flaw in Meteos and some even think it is a fundamental one. Utter rubbish. Scribbling is the equivalent of using every single driving aid going in a driving game. Yes you might stay on the road and get yourself out of the odd hole but you won't get any better using it and those without the driving aids will laugh and point as they scream past you.

If you want to get to the end of the game as quickly as possible to say you've "finished" it then scribble away. If you actually want to play it properly and appreciate it for the masterpiece it is then the act of scribbling won't constitute even the tiniest part of your gameplay strategy.