Every “true” upgrade to the Game Boy has had an incarnation of the infamous Tetris, from the original Game Boy version that became massively popular worldwide with gamers and non-gamers alike, to THQ’s and 3d6 Games’ recently released Tetris Worlds for the GBA.

This latest version of the granddaddy of all puzzlers features several new modes of play on top of the classic Tetris game. All the modes of play from the GC version of Tetris Worlds are featured in this game. Unfortunately, aside from Cascade and Hot Line, which feature interesting quirks on the basic premise of the game, these variations just aren’t compelling enough to merit playing more than once or twice to satisfy one’s curiosity. At the end of the day, most players will opt to just play the original Tetris mode time and time again.

Graphically, there just isn’t much that can be done with a Tetris game. Tetris Worlds features some neat little details to augment its nicely rendered backgrounds. Details include seals flopping across the tundra, or a “Minos” coming up now and then to watch you play. Yet, while all these little graphical touches augment the game nicely, in the end the focus of the game rests solely on the Tetris blocks and the playing field, which are the same blocks we’ve been seeing for the last decade. The sound isn’t anything exceptional either. While the inclusion of remixed versions of the classic Game Boy Tetris themes brought a smile to my face, the rest of the music is not composed as well, and the instrument samples used leave much to be desired.

Tetris Worlds doesn’t differ much from its predecessors at its very core, but thanks to the extra additions, the game certainly feels like an evolutionary step up from those earlier games. Unfortunately, the core game itself is mired by many little faults. First and foremost among those is a bug that allows the player to keep their current tetrad floating just above the top of the stack for a seemingly infinite amount of time. In other words, if you keep moving the block left/right or keep rotating the piece repeatedly just before it hits the bottom, you can move the block around and set it up wherever you want to, at any time. While it could be said that the player could choose not to use this bug if they wanted to, at the higher levels it becomes nearly impossible not to use it as more than likely, you’ll be frantically pressing the buttons anyway in a mad dash to place the tetrad properly before it hits the stack. In the end, this serves only to cheapen the core game’s inherent difficulty. Other smaller faults include things such as the lack of a battery to save high scores of any sort, no Vs. Computer mode or even a single-cart multiplayer mode. All of these things should certainly have been implemented, as previous games such as Puyo Pop for the GBA and even Tetris DX for the Game Boy Color have proven it to be possible.

To make it plain and simple, Tetris Worlds is a decent version of the classic puzzler for the Game Boy Advance, but overall even the years-old Tetris DX is a better version of Tetris.