Pile Up! Review for Xbox One

I feel badly about writing this review as I feel I never gave Pile-Up! a fair shake to impress me. Pile-Up, by developer Seed By Seed and publisher HandyGames, is a 1-4 player co-op puzzle game which sees the players acting as boxes, manipulating the various objects around the environment to collect keys to different levels, collect golden boxes as a means of currency to change one’s box cosmetics, and progress through the minigames and levels of Pile-Up!. Seed By Seed really tried their best to make this game feel original, look fantastic, and provide for a compelling co-op experience to finally attempt to draw players from the multiplayer monopoly that shooters and battle royales have on the gaming industry. I am disheartened, however, to report that against the best efforts of Seed By Seed and HandyGames, they did not manage to make a memorable and fresh puzzle game for players.

Beginning with an assessment of Pile-Up!’s gameplay, I would describe it as superbly mediocre to below average. The entire purpose of the game is utilizing boxes, springs, etc., to hold down buttons, lower bridges, and reach higher places among other things. Instead of an original experience filled with wonderful and intricate puzzles, which produce a sense of motivation and effort in the player, we are met with an incredibly generic and uninspired series of puzzles which are more-or-less the same and do nothing but produce an exasperated sigh in a player as they must complete another clone of the previous challenge.

The key to a good puzzle game are levels that challenge the player through complex problem-solving and an exercise of their deductive abilities; Pile-Up! falls into the classic trap of puzzle games which is the creation of challenge through inconvenience. This means that instead of creating, say, a puzzle with complicated moving parts which need to be arranged in a correct order, Seed By Seed created a game that would find challenge in the fact you had to go back and forth from the same spot four times to collect boxes and put them on a panel. This is not to say that inconvenience is not an integral part of puzzle games (or really any game, for that matter), but I find it uninspired to utilize tediousness as a challenge mechanic.

The controls in this game are very poorly optimized as well, with a simplistic move set of picking up boxes, dropping them, stacking them, jumping, and dashing. The dash is incredibly inconsistent and needs work regarding its directional controls as I often found a millimeter difference of where my thumb was on the joystick to result in a forty-five plus degree angle change in where my box was dashing. You need to have a surgeon’s hands if you want to successfully dash around in this game. I don’t have an issue with a simplistic move set, I often enjoy them in puzzle games, but the responsiveness and fine-tuning of these mechanics is so poor that it just results in frustration. The picking up of, dropping of, and splitting of boxes is miserably honed so you will end up trying about ten times to even position your boxes the correct way. Additionally, the dash is incredibly inconsistent and needs work regarding its directional controls as I often found a millimeter difference of where my thumb was on the joystick to result in a forty-five plus degree angle change in where my box was dashing. You need to have a surgeon’s hands if you want to Once again, an example of challenge through tediousness versus challenge through cerebral stimulation.

I really enjoyed the environmental design and the music of this game. The upbeat bop of the soundtrack really helped me forget that I’d just accidentally dashed into water six consecutive times and the paper-looking aesthetic of the game was an inspired touch to go with the theme of cardboard boxes. Each level is filled with pop-up book looking trees and environments, turning a page like a storybook every time, the player(s) move into a new section of the map. I had a great time looking at the colorful, youthful levels and appreciating the creativity in how well Seed By Seed managed to do such excellent world-building in the manufacture of a universe inhabited by boxes.

Overall, I would only recommend Pile-Up! to parents who are looking to occupy their young children. Pile-Up! does not provide the level of intellectual stimulation in its challenges that would be required for adults, teens, or pre-teens to appreciate, and the tediousness of said levels would produce only more of a volatile reaction among these demographics. Young children, however, I believe would find the environment, music, simplistic move-set and gameplay, and tediousness to be great or ignorable. Pile-Up is currently only $10 on Steam and while I still wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, I do think that there is enough content in the game that someone would be entertained for quite a long time if the game seems like something up their alley. Pile-Up! was a beautiful game with great stylization and concept that fell short through uninspired gameplay and clunky mechanics, play on at your own risk.

For more information, visit: https://www.handy-games.com/en/

Hayden Vassey

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I've been playing video games since I got a Playstation 2 when I was about 5 or 6 years old. The original Star Wars: Battlefront series and the Spyro series initially ignited my interest in gaming, but it wasn't until I got older that I truly appreciated the subtle details that make video games such a unique form of entertainment. My favorite type of video game would have to be any lengthy and plot-driven open world game, with my favorite games of all time being Batman: Arkham City, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Assassin's Creed: Revelations, and Firewatch.

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