Marble It Up! Ultra can trace its lineage all the way to the classic Marble Blast titles from the turn of the century. A sequel to Marble It Up!, this new entry follows the old adage of “bigger is better” by expanding the amount of content on offer.
Marble games normally offer a fairly standard mix of momentum and platforming-based puzzles, and this is no exception. The vast majority of the game’s 100+ levels adhere to this. The gameplay is fun and compelling. This is particularly true of the momentum-centric puzzles, as the game does an exceptional job at conveying speed with your marble. On many of the larger straightaways, you’ll find yourself traveling so fast that you’ll start to get anxious. One false move and you could miss your mark by kilometres. The platforming levels don’t convey this raw mayhem in the same fashion, but they do house the majority of the game’s challenge, especially in later chapters.
There’s something exhilarating about playing out rounds of Takeshi’s Castle but as a marble. The generous checkpoints mean you won’t lose much progress either, assuming you’re purely interested in completing each level as opposed to attaining the top medals, though be wary of weird collision issues on reset — hopefully this is fixed. Attaining medals in the game is a bit uneven, as some levels seem perfectly reasonable with their time requirements, but every once in a while, the constraints are either generous or nigh impossible. There’s not really any consistency to this, but ultimately, it’s a pretty minor problem.
Not content to just have a large pool of levels to dip into, the title also features a multiplayer mode comprising 10 maps and a handful of modes. The best of these is a king-of-the-hill-esque Sumo mode. Across all of these modes, the game shows off its vibrant colour palette and creative level design, with sprawling environments on display in the ethereal void these marble games seem to exist in. This is true of your marble as well, fully customisable with different finishes, hats, and contrails.
Generally, the game is packed to the absolute brim with content, and it’s a blast to play, even if it never sees fit to reinvent the wheel.
