Isometric puzzle games. The words don't fill me with hope, but Wetrix is a complete unknown to me and finds itself on the 1001 list despite being an isometric puzzle game, and so we should give it the time to shine and show itself off.
Get your engineering skills all ship shape because you're about to hold some water. I think.
Frustrations
What the hell just happened? Game Over? A score of 1? The instruction manual, por favor!
There's not a lot of things to think about in Wetrix, but they sure caught me out when playing blindly, and without a goal in mind.
The classic mode begins with various shapes of Up arrows (or 'Uppers') descending, Tetris-style from the top of the screen. You'll use them to terraform the play area below in order to create lakes of soon to be descending bubbles of water.
These lakes will be continually managed - you hope - by various Uppers and Downers being dropped in the right places to stop any water from flowing over the edge, or falling through holes in the middle. The more water that sinks off the map, the quicker your game ends.
But your game will end anyway because Wetrix isn't actually about having the most lakes or controlling the biggest body of water. You score by getting rid of the water - just not over the edge of the map.
It's backwards, is what it is. Backwards. And I haven't even told you about Bombs and Fireballs.
This bad boy is a big bomb, and it'll punch right through the level, making a hole that water loves to drain out of. In the right hands, bombs aren't a problem. In my hands, I put them in the middle of the stage to see what they do firsthand because reading the manual is something that happens after you struggle with your first game.
Fireballs, despite their name, are your friend, as they'll evaporate the water that they touch, which will score you points, and reduce the amount of water that you probably have sloshing over the sides of your badly built troughs.
Fun Times
Once you zoom out a little, you start to see why this is a game worth some attention. It's a basic looking puzzler because it's a water physics tech demo, and when you've time to sit back and watch it, you can just about see the fact that this water tries to level itself out and follows gravity down to lower areas of the map.
That happened to be my best game, 212 points.
The first I saw on YouTube: 1,250,969 points...
Final Word
I'm not a fan of Wetrix. To be really good requires knowledge of the ins and outs of the game, how it works, what the best strategies are and so on, and while that's true of being really good at any game, Wetrix doesn't make itself easy to get into.
It looks like it would be easy, and as I said, it's basically manipulating land to go up or down to catch water, but it just doesn't happen. You do all this stuff and your score sits at 0. Your water meter fills up and you think "oh, ok, catch more water and I'll move to the next level", only it's a bad meter to have fill up and you don't want it to be touched and you should really have read the manual before diving into it.
However, like Wave Race 64 before it, Wetrix shows that the Nintendo 64 can pull off some neat tricks if developers are smart enough to try all this stuff out. It's not a looker, but it's not an overlooker either. It's a game to try, but do read up on how it all works first because going in blind will not end well for you.
Fun Facts
As you might have guessed, Wetrix was developed from a tech demo for a part of a game called Vampire Circus. I don't see that on the 1001 list...
Wetrix, developed by Zed Two, first released in 1998.
Version played: Nintendo 64, 1998, via emulation.
Version watched: Nintendo 64, 1998 (TheNewerGuy, N64 Glenn Plant)