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Meteos Review - DS

I have to say that I've enjoyed Meteos more than WarioWare, Animal Crossing: Wild World and Polarium. Maybe even Mario Kart too. I'd consider it the most fun to be had in my library of DS games. It's a stunner. Seriously.

There's an impressive opening video in great FMV that sets up the scene for the puzzler. Basically, the evil planet Meteo is attacking other planets by raining down big coloured blocks on the environment. All hope seems lost, when three blocks of the same colour suddenly align in mid-air, and rocket upwards. The word is spread, and the planets start fighting Meteo's blocks. Soon, a ship made from meteos is launched to travel to, and eliminate, the source. This story is explored in the 'Star Trip' mode, which I'll get to later.

Gameplay

Basically, you use your stylus to drag blocks up and down the column to form a horizontal group of three blocks of the same colour. When the group is formed, it ignites; flames shooting out the bottom of the tiles and it rockets into the air. However, it doesn't always have enough power to defeat the gravity on the planet you're playing on, so you may be required to rearrange further tiles in the air to ignite it a second time and send it off the bottom screen.

Vertical groups can be formed, but depending on the gravity of the planet, may or may not take off. Oh, and by the way, the meteos stockpile in space for a few seconds, but you can hit a pad on the right of the screen to choose which planet (if there are more than one) to attack when the number is right.

When tiles are ignited they turn black, and can't be used in a group until they change colour a few seconds later. The same applies for the junk blocks that get dumped from your opposition's game (not the randomly falling ones). Luckily, there's a much needed addition to puzzle games that finally makes it's debut in Meteos - a button to speed up time. Just by holding your stylus on the pad to the right of the board, you can make your black tiles turn colourful, but at the expense of a whole lot of meteos dropping down from outer space.

In 'Simple Mode', you choose a home planet to defend (each of which has it's own style of gravity and combination of blocks that fall) and then choose whether to defend until time's up (i.e. highest score per constant time) or allocate novas - extra lives - in a stock battle (i.e. highest score until you died). You can also set the difficulty of the attacking planets, choosing up to three shooting blocks at once, and their competence at their own game. It's great how much you can customise the game.

Every block you send off into the atmosphere gets tallied, and stockpiled. You can then enter 'Fusion' ... (continued next page)