Super Stacker Party (PS3)
In a physics puzzler like Super Stacker Party, there is an unspoken agreement between the player and the game that the physics at play will remain consistent. Since the player is using the physics system to determine a possible solution to a level, it is vital that the mechanics are reliable or else it is possible the level’s intended solution might face some malfunction that pushes the player into constant frustrating experimentation. If the right answer can sometimes arbitrarily produce the wrong result, it can completely undermine the idea that you’re playing a fair game where you can adequately predict the outcomes of your actions.
To accuse Super Stacker Party of breaking this trust first requires the context and then the proof. Super Stacker Party, seemingly known as just Super Stacker at one point, has three main modes. All of them are available in single player challenges, a multiplayer cooperative form where you alternate in a way that just slows things down and leads to more errors, and a competitive mode where the hope is the other player will have their work crumble down first. Stacker mode is the game’s headliner, the player presented with a level where certain blocks are already affixed in the air and they must safely stack a set of additional blocks of different shapes and sizes sequentially in a way where they won’t tip over once all of them have been placed. Present Stacker focuses less on balance achieved through placing blocks carefully as you instead need to reach a marker in the sky shaped like a present with the same caveat that your stack can’t fall over on the way to that present icon that wraps up your tower for judgment. Unblocker is the most unique mode of the three though, the idea being that all of the levels blocks are already in place and you instead can delete certain blocks to help a white object reach a designated platform.
Unblocker is where we can most clearly see the issues in Super Stacker Party’s physics system. This mode does not have the player’s own block placement as a factor, with deleted bricks instantly disappearing and thus conceivably producing the same results every time that action is performed. However, Unblocker mode does have levels where repeating the same solution can lead to different outcomes, such as one where a ball rolls down a ramp and you need to have the right set up of blocks at the end to stop it from rolling off the designated platform. Your piece deletion should not have any outside factors influence it if you delete the same blocks in the same order each time, but it can in fact lead to different outcomes where that ball hits the blocks differently and you are denied a victory for some indecipherable reason. Perhaps the physics system adds in a time factor even though that in no way impacts how the blocks are laid out, or maybe the game forgets that certain blocks are stationary and keeps recalculating how they should impact any objects they’re in contact with to make things less consistent. Whatever flaw is at work behind the scenes, this does throw into question the fairness of every single stage’s design and outcome.
To be fair to the unfair game though, Super Stacker Party’s early levels aren’t wholly aggravating even once you understand this underlying issue. Before the challenge level starts to ratchet up you can more easily get away with an imperfect solution or make a similar solution to the one you just tried eventually work. In fact, each of the game’s three modes has forty levels each, and you can get about halfway through them all before it becomes harder to ignore that the physics aren’t playing nice. This does mean you can get a stretch of simple and quick challenges, ones that still feel like a legitimate challenge despite their issues, or ones with concepts that aren’t harmed too much by the hitches in how objects interact with each other. However, the game does have an odd medal system to reward you for completing a level quickly or achieving other results with your solutions, and the achievements actually have the audacity to ask you to clear multiple levels without losing in a row. It’s definitely hard to motivate yourself to aim for these optional goals considering the flimsy grasp of gravity this game seemingly has, but the content that truly frustrates will be the stages that start to crank up the difficulty to the point precision is required but your ability to practice it is limited.
One issue with precise block placement arises simply from its choice of platform. The PlayStation 3 cannot have the pixel perfect placement of a mouse or touch interface, meaning you need to rely on the control stick and directional buttons to place blocks. The stick is for broader piece movement while the directional buttons are incredibly precise, but that precision comes with the blocks moving incredibly slowly, practically guaranteeing you won’t get the timer medal while also not really being the key to ensuring your solution goes off without a hitch. If this was a game you could always play at your own pace perhaps then trying to get a block in the perfect spot could be possible albeit tedious, but there are other time pressures present outside of optional goals. Every new block means the objects are going to react in some form, towers starting to waver, platforms starting to tip, or balls starting to roll. To beat some levels requires placing the next block fairly quickly after the last, but it actually gets even worse with how tight that window can be.
Despite the limitation on your cursor’s movement speed and its inherent inability to provide both speed and precision, it’s baffling the game has moments where you need to place two objects not even a second apart or the level will be immediately lost. For example, there might be a funnel-like opening in a stage and you’re only given a ball to start, and if this is placed on its own it will fall right through. What you’re meant to do is place that ball and immediately place another a certain small distance away so the balls collide and clog this exit, but here time is indeed an important factor involved in the physics since doing it too early, too late, or in the wrong spot means the level is lost. Many levels are rather small in terms of the total amount of blocks you need to place or have a decent suggestion inherent in their opening layout or name if they are going to require something more complex, but levels that require the player to move that cursor with excellent timing are so prone to error that solving them never feels satisfying.
Perhaps to try and soften the inevitable irritation with the physics puzzles, Super Stacker Party has an inviting cartoon art direction, its pieces featuring reactive faces that emote based on how sturdy their placement in a growing tower is. There’s an attempt to make things look almost handmade with paper and cardboard seeming to make up the backgrounds and important objects like the timer that tells you how long your tower needs to stay sturdy for it to count as a successful stage solution. However, while the backdrop might make it look like you’re stacking blocks in outer space our out in a mountain range, these settings also come with some moving background props. Most of them are harmless fluff to make the background more lively, but there are also giant characters who appear and just start screaming over and over while you play. Whether its a tentacled alien, giant robot, or bigfoot, these nuisances just make the same noise repeatedly for a while and come back way too soon after their retreat, this needless annoyance compounding the problems with how the game seems to test the player’s patience. Not only is this a game that doesn’t have solid rules in play, but it seems almost designed to irritate with these bothersome background characters that make you wish for the more generic and lifeless backdrops since they would at least not interrupt your train of thought with wild warbling.
THE VERDICT: While it starts of innocuous in its simpler levels, Super Stacker Party starts to break down as its required solutions become more complex and the physics system doesn’t seem to handle your input in a consistent manner. This problem in functionality makes the back half of the game’s three otherwise decent mode concepts excruciating as you’ll never know if your solution will unfold in a logical way. Add to this the fact some levels require precise cursor movement done quickly despite its control limitations and the balance focused gameplay suddenly becomes filled with frustrating unfair failures. As a final insult the game constantly has creatures rise up and scream at you over and over while you play, Super Stacker Party feeling almost like it was designed to test the patience of even the most devoted puzzle game fan.
And so, I give Super Stacker Party for PlayStation 3…
A TERRIBLE rating. Without gutting the code or asking someone on the development team how it was made we can only speculate as to why the vital physics engine involved in literally every action the player takes has such inconsistencies. Perhaps it does just perform weak calculations or does them at the wrong moment, but in the game’s early stages there at least seems to be a greater margin of error in favor of the player that keeps Super Stacker Party from being a miserable game right out of the gate. When you do get into the levels designed to be trickier, not only do you have to worry the game might just decide a solution won’t work this time, but the required precision starts to rub up awkwardly against how poor your cursor movement for placing blocks is. Instant failure is a simple mistake away, but if that mistake is one that emerges from the game’s poor controls or strange system flaws it doesn’t really motivate a player to try and figure out the solution so much as it pushes them towards more competent members of this genre.
If things worked properly and there weren’t needless nuisances like the screaming monsters, Super Stacker Party would actually be fine conceptually. Ideas like the Unblocker mode had the potential to help this be a bit more than a run of the mill block balancing game, but Super Stacker Party feels like it’s struggling to stay together, this experience falling apart once you get far enough in to see the true face of its flimsy construction.