Remember at school there would be a smart kid, whose desk would be the focus of all attention when it came to exams, as everyone sneakily tried to glance a look at his paper?
Well, I'm sure the guy who developed Tetris must feel like that kid. His game has been copied so many times that it's hard to remember what the original actually looked like anymore.
Handheld devices are a haven for Tetris clones, and Samulos is yet another one for your collection. The format is the same old story - a load of blocks come tumbling from the sky and you must rotate them as they fall in order to join them in neat rows when the plop to the bottom of the screen.
Most Tetris rip-offs you see at least try to add something new and original to the gameplay or construct some kind of story or plot to make things more interesting. Samulos doesn't do that, and in a way I admire this brazen copying because it's not pretending to be something it's not. And why would you need to? Tetris is a great game, pure and simple, so why change a winning formula?
Of course, it's not exactly the same as the original - there are eight levels, a selection of different backgrounds and some neat music and sound effects. Graphically, it's not as rich as some of the other block-tumbling clones I've seen, but in terms of its gameplay, it's impossible to fault Samulos.
If you like Tetris and are fed up with clones of the game that mess about too much with the original formula, then give Samulos a try.
