Score
Gameplay:	9
Graphics:	7
Sound:	7
FunFactor:	8
PlasmaFactor:	10
Overall:	8.2

Alexey's Dwice Review
April 6, 2006 by Andrew Vawter

by Andrew Vawter - April 6, 2006

Dwice is the newest game designed by the creator of Tetris himself Alexey Pajitnov. In order to avoid writing an entire review based around how Dwice compares to Tetris I’m just going to say that Dwice is a welcome chance that for me has proven to be far more addictive then Tetris ever was.

Good, Simple, Fun!

The premise behind Dwice is that the world has frozen over and it’s your job to go around preventing an "avalanche" from reaching houses at the base of a mountain. This is accomplished by clicking two pieces of the avalanche which similar shapes. Once you find two pieces that match up they both melt at which point you move onto the next piece.

Sounds simple enough but it isn’t. In order to get even halfway decent scores you’ll need to leave a block of ice stranded with no other pieces of ice touching it. When you do this you’ll get a lot more points then you would if you just happened to eliminate it by finding a piece that matched it. One thing to watch out for though is that left click anywhere where there isn’t a piece of ice will actually speed up the rate that the avalanche falls so if you decide to adopt a policy of frantic left clicking you’ll only end up causing the piece to fall faster! There are many bonus pieces within the game itself, which if you can isolate from the rest of the avalanche give bonuses like a big fire wave, which wipes out everything on the screen. This can be really useful if the avalanche is about to crush the houses at the base of the screen.

Beside your mouse pointer and your ability to match two pieces you have multiple weapons to use to help you destroy the ever-encroaching avalanche. You have a "Flame Wave" (this is not the "big fire" that was mentioned earlier) which wipes out the about half of the oncoming avalanche, an "Ice Pick" which allows you to destroy one piece of ice without matching it. And finally you have access to a bomb, which breaks the ice up into smaller pieces of ice.

 

 

 

 

 

All in All...

Eventually the game goes from playing on one playing field to two avalanches at once. Each avalanche happens on a separate part of the screen and you’ll be forced to play both sides at once. This game truly gets hard at that point I’ve barely made it past level 9 at the time of this writing and having looked online even the top scores have barely cracked level 14. With more than 60 levels of play Dwice offers nearly unlimited playing potential.