Wetrix

Puzzle games have always been popular no matter what system you choose to play. It looks like the Nintendo 64 will be no different than systems past and will have its fair share of puzzle games to choose from. Sure, you will get your rehashed games but the question is can somebody come up with something new? Something different? Something fun yet simple enough for everyone to play? The answer is a resounding maybe. Wetrix fits the bill on most of these accounts but not quite all.

Wetrix really has no back story. You are not set in the future looking to save the world or anything like that. I mean, come on, this is a puzzle game for crying out loud. What you will have to do is learn to trap water while avoiding a ton of obstacles through multiple levels. You can play the game in a single player mode, a two player mode, a pro mode or even set yourself up with a handicap that makes life rough from the start. The bottom line is that this is a puzzle game and puzzle games are all about the gameplay so enough of this... Let's get to it!

Gameplay

The gameplay of Wetrix is both easy to explain yet not easy to explain. The game has a square chunk of floating landscape. There are a number of different pieces and objects that will fall from above and it is up to you to place these objects in the most opportune location for what you are trying to accomplish. Sounds a lot like Tetris but believe me, it is absolutely nothing like it.

I mentioned above that the object is to place the falling pieces in the most opportune location. What this means is that some of the objects that fall are called Uppers. These pieces will raise the landscape in the area that they fall. For example, if a piece that is just a straight line falls, the place that you select it to land will raise up, making a barrier or a dam. The thing is, the landscape is flat so the water will run over to the edges and fall off. So, the basic idea is to use these falling Uppers to build an enclosed area of walls or dams so that the water can't escape off the sides of the landscape. Well, where does the water come from you ask? It also falls from the sky. You see, Uppers are not the only thing that you will have to place. Large or small groups of water bubbles will also drop and you have to place them into your dams or else the water will escape off the edges of the landscape. Your little water meter on the side of the screen collects the water that spills and if it fills, you will lose. Did I mention the rain storms?

Are you with me so far? Life would be easy if building dams was all that you had to worry about, right? What happens when your lakes get full? Well, you better just hope for a fireball to drop. If you place the fireball in the lake, the water will evaporate giving you points as well as emptying out the lake so you have a place for the water again. Of course it is hard to tell when you will get a fireball so it is always important to try and build lake areas that can hold a high capacity of water. But this is not all. Actually, this is just the beginning. You will also have to worry about earthquakes if you build the dams up too high, bombs that blow holes in the landscape and ice cubes that freeze your lakes and any water that touches it. Does it still sound like Tetris to you?

The heart and soul of any puzzle game has got to be the gameplay. We all know that graphics are secondary when it comes to these types of games. I think that Wetrix does have some very solid gameplay that will keep you playing for quite some time. One complaint I did have was the game packs a pretty steep learning curve. This is not a game you can sit down and play without reading the instructions and practicing. Personally, I like the challenge and I think that this game has incredible depth (excuse the pun). My significant other, a self-proclaimed puzzle game genius, was not willing to put forth the effort to get the hang of the game so she never got a chance to get drawn into it. Why am I telling you this? Because it think it is important for the people who are looking for a game they can jump on and start playing immediately to know that this game does take some patience to play.

The main buzzword for puzzle games is "addicting". All puzzle games want to achieve that status and Wetrix is no different. The box is quoted as saying "Wetrix just might be the most addictive puzzle game of all time". That is a pretty bold statement to make. The more I played the game, the more I felt that addicting was not quite the right word for this game. I think the game was more challenging and self-pushing than addicting. When I think of addicting, I see myself wanting to squeeze in that one last game at 3:00 AM. I don't think I have the mental sharpness at 3 AM to even play Wetrix. Don't get me wrong. This is not a bad thing at all. Like I said, I like a game that makes you think and the best part is that you have to think and plan ahead longer than just the next piece or two. This alone puts Wetrix in rare company.

I do have one complaint with the game. This may just be me and it might only be my problem but I had a difficult time judging where the piece was lined up on the landscape. The falling piece does cast a shadow to help you guide it but when your landscape gets pretty full, it is difficult to tell where you are aimed. You do have the ability to adjust the camera angles and zoom in and out but the pieces fall so fast that if you don't make up your mind pretty quickly, it is too late. I just wish it were a little easier to tell where things were going to drop. I can't tell you the number of times I was off by an inch or two when I though I was lined up correctly.

Graphics

Like I said above, this is a puzzle game and we all know it is gameplay over graphics. The graphics in the game are pretty good and quite colorful. I don't think there was anything that could not have been achieved on any of the next generation consoles or PC. The rainbow was very colorful and looked great but, once again, it is gameplay that brings you here.

Bottom Line

All in all, this is a decent puzzle game. It may be a bit too complicated for some puzzle fans (like my girlfriend). Don't get me wrong. If you want to spend the time to get to understand the concepts and ideas, anybody can get the hang of it. The question is will you want to spend that time? It was nice to see somebody come up with an original game idea for a change so the developers should be commended for this. Personally, I would rent this game for the weekend and try it out first. That is the beauty of a puzzle game. If you like it and go buy it, you won't lose anything from when you rented it because the game always starts from the beginning if you lose.

EVERY SO OFTEN A GAME comes along which is a little different from your average title. This doesn’t happen very often, presumably because it’s far easier to produce a game based on a successful formula (beat-’em-ups, race games, etc) than to go out on a limb with a totally new kind of game. Wetrix, though, is something different. It’s weird, wacky and wet. Think of playing Tetris in the bath, and you’ll have some idea what we’re talking about.

The gameplay in Wetrix is devilishly simple to learn but fiendishly difficult to master. Don’t be surprised if you finish Practice mode, start your first game in Classic mode and then spend a considerable amount of time repeatedly staring at ‘game over’ screens.

The playing area consists of an isometric 3-D platform which you view from the bottom corner, reminiscent of the old 16-bit classic Populous. It’s possible to zoom in and out to some degree, but due to the 3-D nature of the landscape, it’s difficult to place blocks accurately unless your camera view is positioned fairly close to the playing area.

THE AIM OF THE GAME...

The object of Wetrix is, erm... not to lose. It’s difficult to explain it any other way. There’s no long term objective since – at least in Classic and Pro mode – the game instead runs in cycles. You build up your landscape, it gets knocked down, you build it up again, and so on. In effect, the whole game is pointless – so why is it so frustratingly addictive?

As mentioned already, the basic gameplay is fairly easy to pick up. Red blocks called ‘uppers’ (wow, man!) drop from the sky, and you must move them around and rotate them before they reach the ground where they form a raised wall. The object is to use these walls to form reservoirs in which water is then deposited. The catch is that the pieces aren’t always the shape you need, and to start with you don’t get enough of them to build a wall around the whole area. This usually means that in your first few games you’ll end up with huge holes in your barricades, and will watch helplessly as the water drains away off the edges of the platform.

As water falls from the platform, it slowly fills up a tube at the side of the screen. This is your drain. The idea is to prevent the drain from filling to the top because when it does, the game is over.

Fairly soon, you’ll realise that the idea is to start with a small reservoir which can hold the initial water drops and then enlarge it as you go. The problem with this is that not far into the game it starts to rain, and all this excess water will immediately run off the edges of the platform, thus filling the drain. It then becomes a race to surround the entire platform with walls and of course if you manage to do this, then inevitably your water level will have risen so far that liquid will spill over the original walls and you’ll need to get to work building them higher.

WETRIX – WET TRICKS, GEDDIT?

This is pretty much how the rest of the game goes. You’ll be constantly trying to cover leaks and create new walls. Green ‘downers’ (bogus, man!) allow you to lower the land, widen lakes or connect small reservoirs to make bigger ones. If you are fairly successful and manage to create effective lakes, then you’ll get some nice aesthetic effects which mean bonus scores. Deep lakes, for instance, produce a little duck who happily swims around quacking. A wide lake, on the other hand, grows an attractive rainbow.

Now you may all be thinking that this sounds pretty easy so far. All you need to do is raise walls and drop water in? No problem! But of course, that’s not all there is to it, oh no. The first problem that you’ll probably encounter will be the bombs. These drop down with very little warning and blow a huge hole in the land wherever they land. If this hole happens to be in the middle of one of your reservoirs then the water will begin to drain out extremely quickly. The trick to preventing this is to drop the bomb in a water-free corner of the map and then fill it quickly. Be careful not to drop a bomb into a hole already present in the map though, or you’ll experience a ‘re-bomb’ where numerous bombs drop randomly onto the map and decimate your carefully erected structures.

In addition to falling bombs you also need to contend with ice cubes which turn any water they touch to ice, making it impossible to redirect the water until the ice thaws. The ice can be melted using a fireball, but these are better dropped into unfrozen water as they instantly evaporate it in a cloud of steam, boosting your score and lowering the level in your drain.

As if all this weren’t enough, the playing area is also geologically unstable and if you build your structures too high you will trigger an earthquake, bringing the whole lot tumbling down. If this happens when you have got a gallons of water contained on screen, well...

In addition to the practice mode, Wetrix has a number of other gameplay choices. Classic mode is the best for beginners, and is far from easy. Pro mode, on the other hand, is damn near impossible! No matter how good you are in Classic mode, it’ll be a while before you can last more than a minute or so at Pro level. Time Attack mode is fairly self-explanatory – you get a limited amount of time to score as many points as possible, whilst Handicap mode lets you start with various different factors like raised floors, multiple holes, sheets of ice, and the like.

LET BATTLE COMMENCE!

No good puzzle game would be complete these days without a decent head-to-head mode, and Wetrix offers just such a mode. Two players are able to face off on a vertical split-screen playing area, which makes it rather tricky to see where you are dropping your blocks. It’s actually better to zoom your camera in and then scroll around the play area in order to work out where you want to drop your blocks.

The rules are a little different in two-player mode. For one thing, fireballs don’t dry up the water in your drain. At the bottom of the screen is a gauge with four little characters; a water bubble, an ice cube, a fireball and a bomb. As the game progresses and you earn points, the indicator on your gauge moves up. When one of the little characters starts jumping around, that means you have access to a special attack, and with the press of a button you can launch this upon the other player. The higher up the gauge the indicator is, the more devastating the attack, with the bomb being the most powerful.

Wetrix is weird, wild and incredibly addictive. It might not appeal to you if you’re not keen on puzzle games, although you might surprise yourself if you give it a try. The difficulty level is a bit of a stumbling block to start with, but it’s also something which gives the game the long term playability that really makes it value for money. If you like puzzle games and don’t have one for your N64 yet, then you definitely need to buy this.

Puzzle games rely on simplicity. What was Tetris other than falling Lego bricks? Breakout was simply one-player Pong. Minesweeper? Counting. Simplicity is king in the realm of puzzledom, quirkiness its queen, with addictiveness and subtlety their crown princes, running around the court with gay abandon and bungee jumping without due safety precautions. Wetrix smacks too much of a game that's been heavily designed to be simple, rather than one that lets its simplicity just flow naturally. You can picture heavy meetings with 'design' people and 'marketing' experts, all thinking of simplicity 'concepts' and 'focus group' research into what makes things 'addictive' (Easy on the apostrophes kiddo - Ed).

The idea is to use falling Tetris-style wall shapes to create enclosures on an isometric board, within which to hold pools of water. Let the liquid drip over the side of the board and you lose. Add to the mix various random elements such as bombs, fireballs and ice blocks, and you're in puzzle-crazy heaven!

Or at least that's the theory. In practice, it all seems rather pointless and far too contrived to be truly entertaining. It holds your attention well enough while you're playing, but the moment you stop, there's little to no incentive to return to H Unlike Puzzle Bobble you won't be coming back to this one in a hurry.

Basically, Wetrix is just staggeringly ordinary. Colourful and flashy on the surface, certainly. Just empty of any meaning. (Meaning? In a puzzle game? - Ed) Well, if you play it you'll see exactly what I mean.

Wetrix is an imaginative puzzle game reminiscent of Tetris, only instead of stacking boxes the object is to build walls and barriers on a floating 3-D platform. If done correctly, the falling pieces will stack up to form little corrals in which water will gather as it periodically falls from the sky. The more water that drains out due to faulty pools the quicker you lose.

Along the way you'll have to deal with falling bombs, fire, ice and mines. Use these elements to patch or blow holes in your pools or just wreak havoc on your opponent. As the game progresses, pieces will fall faster with water coming in quicker intervals.

Alternate modes of play include ice-covered platforms, variable landscape and random holes. Two-player Split-screen Mode offers a straight-ahead race for survival with the player who fills their drain first losing.

The only question now is how long can cool new games like this one be spawned from the Tetris archetype?

Excellent water-based puzzler where the object is to prevent water draining off a landscape by building up walls and dams.

Reasonably priced take on the age-old Tetris theme, with water and mountains. It's better than Tetrisphere but, ultimately, lacks variety.

The developer's goal was simple enough: Create realistic-looking water on the N64. But the eventual result yielded more in the form of a happy accident an intriguing 3D puzzle game. Wetrix players form reservoirs on a floating landscape in preparation for impending rainstorms; as long as your pools can contain the falling water, you're fine. However, fireballs, bombs, mines, and a two-player mode will make it anything but easy.