tl;dr: The game is good. Buy it if you like block puzzle games. It's not Tetris. Don't expect Tetris.
So, Anode. One thing above all others to remember when looking at the screenshots is that this game is not Tetris. Its similarities to Tetris are superficial. The only things it has in common with Tetris are that it has falling blocks of varying shape and that the playfield is very restrictive. What it's actually fairly similar to, but not exactly so, is Bombliss/Tetris Blast. It also has similarities to games like Puzzle Fighter and Lumines in the sense that blocks can only be cleared with special detonators of the same color. The mechanics at work here are a bit different, though.
While this is a review and not a game summary, it's hard to review this game without actually reviewing the core mechanics. You have tetronimos made up of different colored cells. Unlike Tetris Blast or Bombliss (but like Tetris,) blocks are placed exactly as they land, which means space management becomes a vital part of the strategy when you're playing Endless mode or the longer Time Attack modes. This, however, can be worked to your advantage when making long chains. The other thing you'll notice immediately is that the colored blocks can be connected diagonally as well as parallel. This becomes a vital thing to remember when setting up for chain detonations later on.
What actually sets you up for the largest scores are, though, is the proper use of couplers. Couplers are special blocks that link two sets of blocks together regardless of their color. This means you can link two chains of entirely different colors together with proper planning and clear them with a single detonator for a large amount of points. You are scored on the size of your chains, the amount of them you can cascade together and how quickly you can actually set them up. Once a chain is detonated, a timer is started that gives you a stacking multiplier to your future clears. Each subsequent clear resets the timer. If you go long enough without clearing a chain, the multiplier resets. Speed, thus, is just as important as long, cascading chains.
Due to the presentation of the game, your first instinct is to play it like it's Tetris. That's the first habit that needs to be broken, but it's one that really only takes maybe about a half hour of play to transition out of. The playfield will feel very cramped indeed with the size of the blocks used - especially before you really start utilizing the couplers to their full advantage. Like Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack, though, once you get used to the game's mechanics, cascading clears will become fairly easy to set up and the game will become more or less instinctive to play. The only thing there will be how fast you can actually perform. The later levels of Endless mode will especially test your speed.
With that all out of the way, the tl;dr of my review is: "It's a great game, especially for $5."
The game doesn't really do anything new. It takes ideas from its many predecessors and puts them together in a single game that actually manages to have an identity of its own. It adds just enough of its own thing (particularly with the couplers and simplistic, but demanding scoring mechanics) to be engaging for the person who likes to chase after higher leaderboard placement. There aren't too many people actively playing the game, so you might find it easy to hit top ten within just a few hours of play (I personally, at the time of this writing, have a top 3 spot in each Race leaderboard and I feel it certainly isn't because of my skill,) but that rarely stops people from wanting to improve for their own sake.
From a technical standpoint, it's rock solid. It's very simple with simple graphics and simple animations that have a good amount of color to them. It feels like it was intended to be a game for mobile made in Unity (mostly because it is,) but actually done correctly. It has enough eye candy to make detonations satisfying to watch, but not enough to really distract you. Screen shake can be a bit annoying after an hour or so of play, but that can thankfully be turned off. Same with controller vibration if applicable to you.
The soundtrack is pretty alright too. It's a dynamic soundtrack of otherwise repetitive techno that amps up in tempo as you reach the top of the screen. Repetitive, in this case, is not a bad thing; it helps keep you focused and zoned into the game. That said, you'll probably end up turning it off after an hour or so and just listening to your own music. If it gets a mobile port, though, the music is a pretty good companion to the game.
There are a few caveats, though. Design-wise, the game isn't as 'tight' as Tetris. The size of the blocks compared to the size of the playfield doesn't always make it conducive to making the types of chains the game really wants you to make. It can be very hard to actually link couplers together as a result of this; a lot of the time, you end up having to bury a coupler under the blocks because you simply don't have room to utilize it.
A lot of this feels due to the block generator. In Tetris games, especially later ones - especially the Sega/Arika ones - the block generator actually isn't random. It is randomly seeded to give you blocks in a specific order, but the blocks all have an intended placement for perfect play. Anode doesn't seem to have this. It feels completely random (at least as random as a computer can get) without any real rhyme or reason to it. It is entirely possible to get three detonators of the same color in a row. It's possible to three couplers of the same shape in a row, just in different configurations that make them even harder to use.
Sometimes your success really does feel like it's up to the RNG on whether or not you'll actually be able to keep up your multiplier. Planning your chains, of course, helps this tremendously, but there is only so much planning you can really do until you have to bury your plans with blocks of different colors because that is literally all you're actually getting. If the playfield were two spaces wider, I feel this would be significantly less of a problem, but maybe there is something I'm missing and simply need to play it more.
I have not been able to try multiplayer mode. The lack of online multiplayer is actually a pretty big issue since this game seems perfect for it. Hopefully we'll see it in a future patch.
Overall, Anode is a great game and especially so for its price. I think it would be even better as a mobile game, but as a PC game, it's still a good buy. The core mechanics are solid, all of the standard puzzle modes are there. With online multiplayer, this would honestly be a no-brainer purchase for people who enjoy block puzzle games of this sort. Even as it stands now, though, it's absolutely worth trying for what is basically the price of lunch.
