Tetris With Guns: GunBlocks Demo

The problem with Tetris, I've always said, is no guns. No guns, no walking, and no plot--that's no video game I recognise. Thankfully GunBlocks addresses those three serious problems with that supposed 'classic.' It's a turn-based shooty puzzle-platformer sort-of-how-much-more-can-I-hypenate thing with a lovely cutesy style and silly sense of humour, starring a little gunbot who needs to place Tetris blocks to pass obstacles so it can shoot more things.

You can play a short pre-alpha demo in your browser, which is much cute intro as it is gameplay, or come on in to watch a bit in a trailer.

The demo establishes a fun tone well, with incompetent bickering bots, a greedy spaceship captain scrapping the mission to recover snacks, and a computer who thinks you're far closer friends than you are. It's fun and it's funny. But I'm not sure I saw enough of the game to get a feel for it.

The puzzling was mostly limited to building a bridge or some steps with tetrominoes, and then the game would continue to feed me more blocks after I'd created a route. I ended up placing spare blocks down just anywhere, not sure why I had them. It only included one snippet of real combat too, where all I really did was raise myself above the enemy turret and bombard them. It didn't feel very strategic or particularly interesting. It was only one fight, though.

It's an early demo with the very opening of the game, so intricacies wouldn't reveal themselves yet. The tone and look is certainly enough to keep my interested and hopeful to see it develop. Creators Cookie Engine say they're planning a Windows and Mac release, "maybe" in 2015.