Tetris 99: How to Attack Other Players

The Battle Royale genre got a kick in the pants when Apex Legends launched, but the release of Tetris 99 did something wholly new for the gametype. You won’t be shooting other players with this 99 player extravaganza, but you can still attack them. And you’ll certainly want to if you ever want to gain a precious victory in this winner-take-all Tetris madness. There’s a few ways to attack others though, so to help here’s a quick guide on how to attack other players in Tetris 99.

There’s two main ways to attack other players in Tetris 99 and they both involve the analog sticks. When you first started playing the game you may have wondered why you had to use the Switch’s oddly crafted D-Pad for movement of your Tetris pieces, and this is the answer. The left analog stick is actually used to target opponents, with the right stick acting as more of a general guide.

How to Attack Other Players

Using the left stick on the Switch you can manually choose what players to attack, sending them trash Tetris pieces whenever you complete a set of rows. Your gameplay area is surrounded by the screens of other players in the game, and flicking the left stick will cycle through them. Alternatively, you can use the touchscreen if playing in handheld mode. This is a more advanced way of attacking other players, as you are specifically choosing someone to send trash to. Likely, you will want to save this for after you’ve spent a good amount of time with the game, and can better understand who is in the lead and who is worthy of your attacks. Instead of doing this, you probably want to focus on the right stick, which is more automated.

Up at the top of your Tetris 99 screen you will see the four options you have when telling the game how to control your attacks. Do you want to focus on getting KOs, or try to take out the players who are attacking you? Would you rather go for random opponents or those who have earned more badges (KO’d other players)? These are you four choices, assigned to up, down, left, and right respectively.

So far, the best strategy in the early game seems to be to focus in on KOs, flicking the right analog stick up to tell the game to do this for you. This means you’ll be sending Tetris pieces to whomever is lagging behind and most easily defeated. After while you probably want to switch to Attackers, especially if you see that a lot of players are focusing in on you. Push the analog stick down to select this. The other two can be used, but so far aren’t offering much more than these three choices.

And that’s how to attack other players in Tetris 99. Get out there and become the true Tetris champion.