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. There is not multiplayer as far as online, which was misleading. If anything I would specify that it's local-multiplayer only. Although this is a cool feature I can't imagine ever inviting someone over to play this. Two people playing on the same keyboard is some weak as hell multiplayer if you can even classify it as that. 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.

It looks like Tetris, and has similar game controls, and you lose the game when the blocks reach the top, but it's NOT a Tetris clone. My initial impression is that there's more strategy to this game than Tetris.

There are a good number of game options, and you can turn the "Items" on or off. "Items" act like one-use power ups and can help to get you out of a jam at the very last second.

It IS one of those games where you tell yourself "just one more try", and another half hour goes by because you lied to yourself. Fun! :)

At first I thought I would be way too slow and stupid to figure it out, but this game gave me more chances than I ever expected, even when I started panicking because the puzzle pieces came falling down faster and faster. It has a good learning curve and can be really fun once you get the gist of it.

I found this when looking for games similar to Tetris. If you are interested in falling block puzzle games, I think you should give this a go.

A Tetris like game where you match the colours of sets of blocks dropping to create chains that can eventually be eliminated.

It was largely about the achievements for me, and at first I wondered if I could really be bothered, but boy does it grow on you; It doesnt click quite so immediately as Tetris, but when you start grasping how to move fast, create big chains, and use the power ups, goals that appear completely out of reach start getting knocked down real fast and in satisfying ways.

It looks fine, the sound and music are excellent for zoning out to, and it plays smooth with familiar controls for this kind of game.

I do wish there was better multiplayer than its limited local play, as others have also noted, but for such a low cost, and what becomes a really quite addictive game for a few hours, I still definitely recommend it.

This game is incredible!
It is well thought out and every mechanic is logically derived from its predecessor Tetris.
The slick graphics make it also very appealing for the eye.
Its a must have!

It's absorbing and endless but the scoring's broken;

score over 2BN in a combo and it becomes a minus number. Don't imagine this will be fixed after 6 years which is fair enough, I think.

Great 2-player as well.

If you like Tetris, then you'll simply LOVE Anode! The new capabilities help to make this game a fresh take on an old classic.

I got bored with Tetris over twenty years ago, but this variant managed to hold my interest for nearly seven hours. That's enough to earn it a mild recommendation in my book.

this is a game where you fit coloured blocks together to make them disappear. Each game played gives a score. in the short time i have played my score started at 44,820 to 318,960. it is a visual game.

A fun twist on Tetris, where color combinations only clear if an activated cell is used. Hard to describe but easy to play. Recommended for puzzle fans.

A "positively electric" mix of Tetris and colour-matching game. Rather than filling rows like in classic Tetris, Anode has you set up and detonate chains of blocks. Recommended to any fan of Tetris and/or matching games! ^_^

Place two blocks of the same colour beside one another (diagonally counts) to form a link between them. Link a shiny block of the appropriate colour to explode the whole chain for points! Some pieces also have a triangular coupler block attached: match two couplers together to link the two blocks either side regardless of their colour. Make matches quickly to build up a combo, dramatically increasing the points you get.

There are a variety of game modes: Endless, Mission, Time Attack (get a high score in limited time), Race (reach X score as quickly as possible), and versus multiplayer. Also, each mode can optionally be played with items: these drop randomly, can be used on demand, and have effects like "destroy the bottom row" or "random explosions"~

10/10
When my wife and I were gaming exclusively on a Mac and wanted a Tetris-style game, Anode was there for us. Even now that our options have expanded, it has joined Tetris, Tetris Attack, Puyo Puyo, Dr. Mario, and Hebereke's Popoitto as a go-to puzzle game for us.

Every once in a while it is difficult to distinguish the color of a block or a "bomb" piece, but this happens rarely enough to be more of a fun handicap rather than a real issue.

I just bought this game on a whim during the Summer 2017 sale. It was a great price so I tossed it in my cart. I am really glad I did. It looks similar to Tetris-- but it isn't a clone. There is more to it than falling shapes. You link up the colors, then explode the group with an electric spark before the stack reaches the top. Anode is well made with colorful graphics and different objectives within the game. It is a fun casual game and a steal at full price...even better on sale.

This is a fantastic game that reminds me a lot of tetrinet.

It runs so smooth, it's quick and rewarding, very clever mechanics and enjoyable to play.

However I would not recommend it because of two major flaws:

- No online multiplayer.
- Not colorblind friendly

I also found that the achievements were way too easy, I got all the "challenging" ones within my first 5-6 games - without even seeing the difference between yellow and green.

Anode is exactly the falling block puzzle game Steam needed. It's very different from a standard falling blocks puzzle game as you match pieces not horizontally and vertically, but also diagonally as well. You create chains of alike colored blocks using tetris-like pieces and destroy them with detonators to earn points. Clearing several chains in a row raises your sequence bonus and that can lead to some intense moments. I'm kinda glad that Anode came out, Steam needs more puzzle games.. .-.

While similar to many puzzlers you may have played, Anode brings an original and well balanced formula to the genre. The combo system rewards aggressive and reckless play more than idiot-savant organization, which I found, as an non-aueter, made the speed escalation in later levels much more coherent and enjoyable than most. The ability to to link combos across diagnals is suprisingly rare, and creates chains and collapses that put the competitors to shame.

Initially (first 30 minutes), my response was tepid, but after taking the time to pursue the score based achievements, the balance and challenge started to click. Once I started playing against my brother, it became addiction. It's quickly become my favorite puzzler of all time.

I like it better than:
* Tetris
* Super Puzzle Fighter
* Mean Bean Machine
* Dr Mario

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.

What can I say - it's Tetris with Lasers :)
If you remember back with a whistful smile to the time you plaed Tetris on your computer. then your first sight of this game should bring all those fond memories flooding back. This game is ideal if you have 10 to 15 minutes to kill and you just wnat to chill out for a bit. With various games modes like "Endless", "Race", "Mission" and Time Trial", Anode will be sure to keep you entertained.

So go on, grab it now ... you won't regret it :)

(I Came, I Saw, I Conquered)

This game was an impulse buy, but luckily a purchase that isn't regretful in any way. The game plays very similar to Tetris, but with a few twists; explode the combined colors instead of making lines. This game has tons of modes; however, it doesn't have online multiplayer, but you and a buddy/sibling/parent/cousin/intelligent animals can enjoy this game via local multiplayer.

Highly recommend playing this game as it has potential to be better with updates (online multiplayer, please).