Tetris is a long-standing franchise that has went through many revisions in its mechanics. Naturally, some changes end up derided for taking away the challenge or adding frustration to a puzzle classic:
- The infinite spin mechanic, which some players feel makes high scoring runs trivial. Players can keep spinning a piece in place to avoid having it locked. In some games, even the square piece is affected. To wit, there is very little difference between playing a survival-style mode in level 0 compared to playing it in level 20+. The only difference in the latter is you have to keep rotating the piece to keep it active and cannot "climb" walls of blocks. Timed and competitive modes are less affected.
- Another complaint about the Super Rotation System is wall kicks
. Basically, if you try to rotate a piece and at least one block would occupy another block, the game will attempt to move/"kick" your piece to adjacent locations. Problem is, the order of kick attempts seems to bias in favor of kicking your piece upwards, making it difficult to fit most pieces into a tight space; the game will likely end up popping the piece back out instead.
- Another complaint about the Super Rotation System is wall kicks
- Tetris Friends' Marathon mode, rather than the traditonal system of leveling up every 10 lines, you instead have a variable level-up system where you have to achieve a certain number of Goal units to level up, and higher-value clears award a higher proportion of Goal units relative to the number of lines cleared. This leads to a very strange metagame where doing 2-combos of singles and T-Spins yields more points per Goal unit than a Tetris, which takes off 8 units and therefore causes the game to end sooner with much worse score. Any excess Goal when leveling up does not carry over, so Tetrises are saved for when you have 1 Goal left before level-up. The top scores usually have something along the lines of 250 1-combos of singles and less than 20 Tetrises, leading to some players to jokingly suggest that the game be called "Single" or "T-Spin" instead of "Tetris". Later Tetris games like Puyo Puyo Tetris and Tetris 99 ditch the goal system in their Marathon modes, going back to the traditional "level up every 10 lines" system, and the Goal system has not been revisited since.
- Many of the games give an enormous number of points for clearing lines using a T-Spin, to the point that the highest scoring games revolve around setting up T-spins for every line. While there's skill to it, this can feel like downright Gameplay Derailment for those used to just trying to get Tetrises in the old games. Alternatively...
- Most of the older games gave an incredible amount of points for Tetrises (clearing 4 lines simultaneously), making even doubles and triples a detriment to getting a high score.
- The Back-To-Back bonus, which awards bonus points for consecutive clears that are either Tetrises or T-Spins, with nothing else in between. While it does reward players for being able to pull of major stunts with regularity, it incidentally also punishes players who do smaller, more defensive line clears to keep the stack clean.
- Long combos sending large numbers of garbage lines (5 lines per clear when above 10 combo) is near-universally hated, since it's easy to exploit via the "4-wide" technique, in which the player sets up 4 empty columns in such a way that they can clear over 10 lines in a single combo. Tetris Effect: Connected attempted to nerf high combo damage to combat this. Meanwhile, Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 not only kept the combo table the same, but changed the game timings in such a way that 4-wide ended up even more overpowered, which led to many complaints by high-level players after release.
- Tetris 99:
- The game doesn't explain any of the new Battle Royale-esque mechanics anywhere, and, to make a comparison to Fortnite, doesn't have any sort of playground mode where you can learn the mechanics in a casual setting.
- Were you hoping 999 Lines in Marathon would be just like 150 Lines mode, except the game keeps going after 150 lines? Well, it is...but the speed curve is stretched out, meaning that line 300 is about as challenging as line 0. There is a spike in fall speed at 500 lines, but good luck not getting bored and quitting before then. And unlike in 150 Lines mode, you can't choose your starting level, so you gotta work all the way from 0 lines every time.
