Stacks On Stacks (On Stacks) (Stadia)

Take the balance focused gameplay of a game like Art of Balance, add in the semi-random block distribution from Tetris, and throw in some original wackiness like a giant baby or a military fish, and you’ve got Stacks On Stacks (On Stacks).

 

This silly genre blend for Stadia tells the story of girl named Rockit, a so-called Master Stacker who is called into action when the idyllic lives of some strange living objects such as an artist avocado and sentient t-shirt are interrupted by blocks falling down from the sky. For some unexplained reason, stacking the blocks high enough in an area will supposedly stop the block rain, so Rockit heads off to build towers where all her friends live, and the desert too, which the game helpfully reminds us no one lives in. Stacks On Stacks (On Stacks) is kooky all the way through and happy to remind us of that, and while it doesn’t do too many traditional joke deliveries, the game keeps throwing strange things at the wall for the player to decide if any stick. From a game show host who will angrily add his wig to the block tower if you answer incorrectly to silly purchasable costumes for Rockit, the game that can’t help but add an additional “On Stacks” to the title does a lot to dress up its otherwise dry gameplay style, and to its credit, much of the game’s silliness is quite charming without being overbearing.

 

In a typical level of Stacks On Stacks (On Stacks), blocks will drop in one by one from above, the player guiding their course and able to rotate them clockwise and anti-clockwise to help them better fit into a large tower they’re building. Most levels ask the player to build a tower up to a certain height with these blocks, the level then wrapping up with a large wrecking ball swinging in so you can switch from carefully stacking pieces on top of each other to the catharsis of tearing things down with reckless abandon. However, if the tower topples during regular play, you only have three lives per stage before the entire level resets. Any piece that lands outside of the foundational area will take a life from you, although there is a grace period after one has fallen out of the area where no further blocks will count, meaning that a tower toppling will most likely only take one life from you. Dying isn’t too big a worry since you just try the level again, but having your own towering stack fall because you didn’t balance the pieces right is punishing enough on its own without there being some other limitation on rebuilding it.

The pieces used to build your towers typically include rectangular blocks of different sizes and shapes. Wide but short platforms, huge cubes, long thin pillars, and plenty of size distributions in between are your usual tools, but some levels will throw in tough shapes to work with like one half of a sphere or a cone with a flat top, these odd shapes bothersome in a regular level but finding some interesting use in the Warp Zones where they are the only pieces provided and you actually need to learn how to balance them properly rather than just putting them where they won’t cause much trouble. During a regular stacking level, the block distribution is done just fine, the player given a large foundation so they can do things like put pieces that would hurt their tower off to the side or even work on more than one tower at once, distributing complementary pieces to whichever tower would survive having the new piece added to them. These stages touch on the appeal of trying to work out the right balance for your block stacks, and with a surprisingly catchy song backing them, it’s easy to see why someone might have a good first impression of the game. However, when the gimmicks get mixed in, the game starts to fall apart.

 

After the simple starting levels, Stacks On Stacks (On Stacks) starts messing with the foundations and goals of the stages, and while it would be false to say they are all bad, many of them seem to be incongruous with the goals of the game and even expose a major flaw in its design. In a regular level, the fact that the next piece that will drop in is semi-random isn’t too bothersome. If it doesn’t work for your tower you can just lay it out of harm’s way, and while it can pay off to add risky pieces to the body of your stack, it is never actually required. When the gimmicks start to be added to play though, you don’t have the option to react to these new pieces in a safe way. In some levels the foundation is a single small platform you have to put all your pieces on, so if the game drops in a block that would completely throw off the balance of your tower, you either have to try and fit it on there and likely lose your work, or you chuck it into the area where you’ll lose a life for doing so. This block delivery style causes problems in other gimmick stages as well such as one where the blocks are all slowly sinking into quicksand. If you aren’t getting big enough pieces to constantly outpace the slow sink here, you’ll spend an abnormally long time on this level just waiting for things to go your way.

You can speed up how fast a piece descends, but this exposes another unusual issue with the game, and that’s the seemingly inconsistent physics. While I’m willing to give the balance physics the benefit of the doubt as they seem convincing enough, sometimes when a piece drops in on your pile, it will just bounce a little for little discernible reason. It might be tied to the speed of the drop sometimes or the specific shape of your tower, but the most ridiculous case of block physics gone awry happened in a situation where no logical excuse existed. I had an absolutely massive cube as a base thanks to a special power up, and every other block on the tower was stacking happily on this cube. However, one random piece, not even dropped in at speed, touched the top of this flat surface and didn’t just slightly bounce, it outright leapt to the side, leaving itself at an awkward diagonal angle for no clear reason. These little bounces can mess up an otherwise perfect tower even when the movement is minor, and in stages where you have no room for failure, seeing what success you have managed undone by randomness really grinds on the player’s tolerance for such inconsistency. This can get even worse if you want to earn all the coins in the game. While you only need a level complete star to move on, most levels have a par time where you can earn an extra coin on top of the freely provided one for completion. Of course, since your blocks are semi-random, to go for these sometimes requires resetting a level right at the start if you are given a piece that won’t work as the foundation, and because of these, achieving par times is probably best thought of as a happy accident rather than a goal to shoot for.

 

You do not have to play every level to get to the end, but you will still encounter some bothersome gimmicks along the way. The tilted play field that asks you to make a messy pile at the bottom of a ramp is probably a good candidate for skipping, but even some of the less offensive gimmicks aren’t too exciting. One set of levels involves you placing blocks on top of seeds to prevent them from growing into tall flowers, but the process is too simple that the levels lack any challenge. There are some good gimmicks of course, some levels asking you to not build a tower that’s too high, the player needing to cram the set amount of blocks in a small area to succeed, and the final level of the game is definitely a fun twist on the stacking physics. However, none of these are quite creative enough to make up for the ones that don’t gel with the game’s design, regular stages going by too quick to make up for the bothersome bad ones.

 

You might wonder why I’ve gone so long without mentioning the giant baby again, and that’s because it’s part of what could have been Stacks On Stacks (On Stacks)’s more safe form of integrating unusual gimmickry. Every now and again in most stages, a block with different strange events on each side will fall into the play field, and depending on which symbol is face up, you’ll encounter some strange shake-up. Some of these are beneficial, the baby actually throwing in three nicely shaped cubes before you have to find a place to put the baby itself, and the military fish will give you some fish tanks to stack with that are mostly safe additions to a tower save for their open tops that blocks can slip into. The game show asks you real trivia and will provide tall rectangular cash stacks to help a tower along if you get it correct, but he’ll throw the awkward microphone and wig in if you’re incorrect. Some of these are complete breaks away from the stacking for a while such as guiding a skydiving cat through rings or playing as a frog creature as it collects coins around your stack, but there are ones that are detrimental. Ghosts or a dragon can mess with your stacks if you don’t repel them properly, and some events like the one that drops fine art into the play field can be detrimental if you have nowhere to place a very thin portrait or a strangely shaped sculpture. Trying to get a helpful event by speeding up the block properly or dealing with the roll if it goes poorly do break away from the stacking gameplay well, but they too can have bad relationships with level gimmickry and some like the ghost shooting game become tedious the more you see them since they’re slow and easy. Rather than taxing the core design of the game with incongruous stage gimmicks, it might have been wiser for the developers to pursue the potential of these more, the player able to avoid these or benefit from them and thus alleviating some potential frustration.

THE VERDICT: Stacks On Stacks (On Stacks) starts off solid, but this balancing game soon starts to crumble as it adds in pieces its design isn’t built to handle. When level gimmicks start asking for precise building, the fact the blocks you’re given are nearly random can make these stages drag on as you aren’t able to build a sufficient stack because the game won’t give you the right pieces. The event block is an interesting shake up to play, but these can exacerbate little issues in the design as well. Inconsistency is this game’s fatal flaw, and with most of its less frustrating levels being simply serviceable, its few interesting ideas and zany tone end up wasted on this imbalanced title.

 

And so, I give Stacks On Stacks (On Stacks) for Stadia…

A BAD rating. Choose the right path through Stacks On Stacks (On Stacks) and you can skip some of its worst levels, but avoiding content is never a solution to the content being poorly conceived. There’s a decent game to be found in Stacks On Stacks (On Stacks) and one that threatens to be better when you briefly taste a gimmick with potential, but it quickly flits onto the next one, and to make its later levels more difficult, it starts throwing in ones that are too dependent on the whims of block distribution rather than the ability of the player to successfully create a tall tower. The double-edged nature of the event block feels like the right way to add semi-random elements to the game, a potential benefit or detriment you have some influence over and one that brings in disruptive gimmicks for only a short period. I may not like the music-shaped note blocks of the Sax On Sax (On Sax) event, but it can prove useful at times, it can be avoided by rolling the spinning block right, or you can even outright sacrifice a life if you think the potential of a strange event like that one could ruin your tower. In the quicksand stage though, you’re just hoping that you’ll keep getting the right shaped blocks so that you can build a properly tall tower at some point.

 

Having even a tiny bit of physics inconsistency on top of flawed gimmicks really holds the game back from being even a decent time. Once you get past its first few levels, Stacks On Stacks (On Stacks) loses its charm, and while the silliness of a skydiving cat in a tuxedo can lighten the mood at times, the pieces this game is built from just don’t fit together well.