Review: Aqua Aqua

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	GALLERY

by Star Dingo

(IDG) -- Anyone who's familiar with the hyper-addictive Dreamcast and N64 puzzler Wetrix Plus will immediately recognize Aqua Aqua for the PS2-it's the same exact game with a few gameplay tweaks, graphical improvements, and a quartet of Hello Kitty-esque Teletubbies on board for moral support.

The concept is simple: Water is falling down from the sky, and your job is to build up dams, lakes, and reservoirs from Tetris-style chunks of plummeting land, trying to keep the water from spilling off the edge of the square-shaped playing field. Sound easy? It is and it isn't. Building and maintaining a single, giant lake isn't too terribly mind-blowing, but things get tougher when you realize certain arrangements of land and water earn you bonus multipliers. To complicate things ever further, earth-destroying bombs, pond-freezing ice cubes, and fireballs that evaporate your lakes come down from above, throwing off your landscaping designs.

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Graphics: 4.0.
Clear and colorful. It's one of the niftier-looking puzzle games out there-even if there's not a whole lot of variety. Your 3D landscape smoothly takes shape, and the water effects are suitably nifty. A few more new backgrounds to choose from would have been nice, and the simple Teletubbie-like creatures are far too round and delightful for their own good.

Sound: 4.0.
A nice, well-done assortment of glorified bleeps, bloops, Doppler noises, and a useful announcer. The music is actually pretty cool, too-even though you're usually too caught up in the action to notice.

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Controls: 4.0.
Super simple, with a few very minor quirks. It's a little bit difficult to line up your chunks of land with precision when the pieces' shadows are hiding behind the hills you've made-not that dead-on precision is really all that important. The shadows of your falling pieces tend to "drag" behind your targeting cursor, too, making it slightly confusing to figure out where exactly your piece will land.

Fun Factor: 4.5.
This PS2 version of Wetrix Plus incorporates a number of tweaks and improvements that stretch the longevity, including a new feature-unlocking "story" mode (while it's not very story intensive, it's still a different kind of game), a nice variety of higher-level bonuses for experts to earn, and a superior Vs. mode that adds a lot more variety to the two-player experience. A fast, frantic blast.

Pro Tips

  • Create a slag pile in the corner specifically to store pieces you don't want to use. Don't worry about your mountain getting too high-when a bomb comes around, use it to knock it all down and start again.

  • Building your outer perimeter two levels deep may seem like a good idea, but be careful-your landscape will be much more easily prone to earthquakes.

  • Make sure you set aside some space for Lake Mates right from the get-go. Have an area of your landscape set aside for several small, deep ponds where the score-multiplying Mates can thrive.

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