Tetris on the Sega Genesis is fascinating. This is one of the rarest Sega Genesis games of all time, and it was a shock that in 2019, SEGA and M2 brought the game over to the Genesis Mini, which was where I played it

The gameplay here is your standard Tetris; it's self-explanatory at this point. However, I find the controls here to be quite clunky and delayed, and that is not something you want to hear when you play a Tetris game. Also, the speed at which the Tetrominoes fall goes really fast. It's standard that the speed of the fallen Tetrominoes goes up when reaching the high levels, but it’s just way too much in this game. The max level I can go up to is like 10 and combining this with the clunky controls just hinders my experience with this version

The visuals haven't aged the best. They go for highly-detailed backgrounds of realistic landscapes (At least I think) that looks so pixelated and not pleasant to look at nowadays. The music is also a huge miss. They don't have the iconic Russian songs like in the Nintendo versions and instead have their own original songs (I think). I'm not a fan of the music here, and there are only two songs that play in the background; one is the normal version and one is the version that plays when you're close to reaching the top

There's just no variety here, and I think summarizes this whole game up for me. It's completely barebones, and while it's neat that it's on the Genesis Mini, it's just more of a novelty than anything, and the legacy surrounding the game is overshadowed by the actual game itself

Just like Columns, it's fun in short bursts, but it isn't something I want to back to from time to time. While this isn't a bad version of Tetris, I just feel like you have better options

Reviewed on Mar 08, 2023


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