Puyo Puyo Tetris

Despite its appearance as your average, colourful puzzle game, Puyo Puyo Tetris actually offers a much deeper challenge than other games in the genre can muster. Sega's Tetris and Puyo Puyo mashup also excels at local multiplayer, so there's every reason to take a closer look. Whereas with things like superheroes, mash-ups tend to have a set formula, in the case of Puyo Puyo it's like combining Ludo and Chess or Uno with Poker; they are games that make use of similar features. It's not just two universes colliding, but two sets of mechanics.

It shouldn't be possible to make Puyo Puyo combinations among all the Tetris pieces on the screen, but it is, and in Fusion mode the pieces blend like it was meant to be without any rhyme and reason, and your complete Tetris rows can be sabotaged by random Puyo blobs. In order to handle it at all, Tetris pieces can squish the blobs below, but you give up points by doing this. It's only when you're playing both systems at once and picking up Puyos and Tetris rows as combos that points start to stack up and you'll climb the leaderboards.

For those who don't know Puyo Puyo (a game that's popular in Japan but never really took off in the west), it's very similar to Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. What got many people hooked was the fact that it was possible to play local multiplayer with up to four people, as well as the fact that the character you play as comes with super powers that actually affect the puzzle gameplay.

Tetris, on the other hand, hardly needs any introduction, although Puyo Puyo Tetris does things a little differently, and is one of only a couple of titles based on the game that merges the classic gameplay with a story. It's just as insane as you might imagine, and this is definitely a Japanese puzzler, with screaming mascots and anime girls aplenty. Nevertheless, it works, not so much because of the story itself, but due to the seemingly infinite number of reasons for the protagonists to play Puyo Puyo or Tetris (or a combination).

The actual story mode offers plenty, especially for those who intend to play alone. The narrative itself may not be important, but every new round in the game is designed as a challenge with high score lists and ranking raising the stakes dramatically. There's always a strong urge to earn three stars (the highest ranking) in all of them, but just playing through the story took us five hours, and after 15 hours we've still not got three stars on all levels. The pure Tetris challenges often come across as fairly easy in comparison, especially for those who have grown up with Alexey Pajitnov's brilliant game. It's still difficult, no doubt, but when Puyos are thrown into the mix, your brain is forced to think differently and things quickly get tricky.

The combination of the two universes makes for wonderful variation, as you're constantly switching between two quite different games, and together they create a third game that you also need to adjust to. It shouldn't work on paper, but the fact is that it does and it's brilliant. It works like nothing else, and instead of just being a collection of two good puzzle games, you get to experience something brand new.

You can't ignore the fact that both Puyo Puyo and Tetris are very good games on their own and, of course, it's possible to play them that way, and as far as the Switch version goes (the one we've tested), it's fun to play with up to four people in these two games. Enjoying multiplayer in Tetris is obviously nothing new, but Puyo Puyo Tetris makes it extremely good, and it's the distinct Japanese design which makes everything beautiful, reinforcing the notion that sometimes the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts.

Add to this the fact that there's a lot of fun game modes that give you added variation, and a very good training mode, and you'll start to realise why we consider this a complete package. Both Puyo Puyo and Tetris are better than ever here, but if that's enough to justify the price tag, that's something you must decide for yourselves. For us, though, we'd wholeheartedly recommend this to fans of the genre, as two of the world's best puzzle games have been combined to create something even better.