Groovin’ Blocks Review

Combining Tetris and techno, Groovin Blocks for the Nintendo Wii takes a fresh approach to the falling block puzzle genre. Facing a slightly tilted yet familiar vertical board, you attempt to match the colors together before the blocks come to rest at the bottom. The twist here is the addition of music to the scoring mechanism, allowing you to exponentially increase your score by setting your blocks and creating combinations by timing their descent with the music.

As the blocks fall, horizontally scrolling markers at the top of the board indicate opportunities to increase your score by timing when you press down on the Wii remote to set a block at the exact time when the marker reaches a certain point. This means that, in addition to concerning yourself with matching the colors in the board with the falling block, you also have to time the fall to coincide with the markers above if you want to score really well. This added layer of complexity keeps you on your toes, providing an extra challenge but also an opportunity to increase your score significantly.

There are gamplay problems in Groovin Blocks, however, and those can get irritating and prevent you from enjoying the game as much as you’d like. For one, the slightly tilted angle of the main screen means that you actually have less time to plan how you want to align each block, even though you’d think the opposite would be true, since in theory a back tilted board would give you greater depth of view, like in the music games Rock Band or Guitar Hero. This just doesn’t play out very well in standard definition, however, because it’s difficult to view color orientation, and the vertical size of each block piece makes the total height of the puzzle space seem too small. The tilt just makes the vertical screen seem smaller, the blocks seem squished, and even on my 42” screen everything just felt compressed and messy, especially as the blocks pile up. Combine the lack of time with the need (or want) to play the game as intended and time the block’s release to the beat, and you have a real problem. Bottom line, gamers should have at least an option to play with the board in a fully vertical position.

For the most part, I was not able to keep track of the beat and make effective combinations simultaneously. At the beginning of a song, while the board was empty, it’s easy to keep your eye on the side and play with the beat, but as the action heated up and the board filled up, it became more and more difficult to play the game that way. Eventually, you just give up and worry about clearing the board only. And if you try to play by ear, meaning that you would rely on the song’s beat rather than having to look over, you’d only get a small fraction of the markers, not to mention the fact that you would miss the superbeats. This is disappointing considering how the aforementioned music games manage to time the notes perfectly with a song’s beat. Because every beat isn’t represented by a marker, you are forced to keep an eye on the scrolling markers in addition to the falling blocks, and I simply did not feel like the board/marker layout and orientation were optimal for the task.

Even with those issues, I still had fun playing Groovin’ Blocks. There is plenty of content too in this budget release ($19.99 msrp), with over 50 levels and competitive or co-op multiplayer modes, though they are offline only. The game was previously released on Wiiware, though this review is based on the retail disc version.

Groovin’ Blocks is a valiant but sometimes flawed attempt at creating a fresh take on the puzzle genre. The concept simply isn’t allowed to achieve its full potential given the developer’s choices for the presentation layout. The main problem lies with the board, the block pieces, and the general speed of the game, even at the earliest songs. It is sometimes very difficult, and in turn frustrating, to attempt to play the game the way the developers intended. When you ARE able to get “in the zone” and stack blocks to the beat, you see the potential. The game is still undoubtedly fun (you can’t mess up Tetris too much), and the soundtrack is superb. Fans of puzzle games in general will want to look into this game and experience this unique puzzle/music mashup.