Marble It Up! Ultra Review

If you’re fortunate enough to have owned an Xbox 360 back in the day, then you may remember an Xbox Live Arcade gem known as Marble Blast Ultra. It was a game that was quite unique and had you navigating a marble across a myriad of platforms, twists and turns and towards an end goal. 17 years on we see a heavily inspired Marble It Up! Ultra and there is good reason for that as the original designers of Marble Blast Ultra are responsible for the creation of this new iteration.

It is a story made of love for marbles from the Marble Collective. The players who modded the original game all those years ago have now jumped on board to help with the creation of this new title. For more insight on this it is well worth checking out the interview with the lead developers over with Luke Lohr at Xbox Expansion Pass with this video. Believe me when I say you’ll have a really fun time with this one!

Loading this one up was really nostalgic for me, thinking of those Xbox 360 days. I was 21 years old when the original game arrived, still with plenty of youth on my side. Xbox Live Arcade was very unique back then with one or two different games landing on a specific day. I had disposable income back then so I would indulge in almost everything. Now there are literally dozens of indie games landing across all platforms all the time, so some hidden gems are hard to discover. Marble It Up! Ultra takes me back to happy memories.

The premise here is very simply echoed across from the original and that is to roll your marble from the beginning of each stage to the end goal. There is a meaty chunk of content here with 100 levels plus a plethora of user made creations, yes you can craft your own stage designs and upload them. Bring all of this with online multiplayer and you really can’t ask for much more.

There are three modes to choose from off the bat, these include Single Player, Weekly Challenge and Multiplayer. There are ten different worlds to work through in the solo portion of the game each with around twelve levels. Each world offers some visual variance to the mix and as you’d imagine, the more you progress, the more of a challenge each stage presents to you. Weekly challenges offer the opportunity to dip back into the game once you have finished everything in the core experience.

Online multiplayer surprised me with the fact that it is crossplay between all platforms, something which a lot of indie games stuggle to achieve. Whilst player numbers can be quite low at certain points during the day, it didn’t take too long to get stuck into some matches. There are a handful of different game modes but by far my favourite was gem hunt. All players are dropped into an arena and you must roll around to obtain as many gems before the timer expires. A simple task but ultra competitive amongst random players or friends.

The most impressive factor of the game is the fluidity and movement of the marble itself. Everything feels natural in terms of physics and it feels really enjoyable to replay some levels to see how you can improve your completion times. Along the way you’ll pick up power-ups and on progression you can even unlock cosmetics that you can customise on the way. This does encourage exploration on certain levels which brings more hours of gameplay should you want them.

Visually the game is quite basic but the vibrancy of level design along with your super fast marble movement makes the game exhilarating to play. The ability to play around with cosmetics bring changes to the aesthetics anytime you choose. Audio design is also great with a relaxing and sometimes high tempo soundtrack. The rolling sound of the marble is satisfying to the ears.

Marble It Up! Ultra takes all the great bits from the past projects gone by and brings more to the table. There is an impressive feast of content with over 100 levels to plough through with weekly challenges and online multiplayer extending the longevity of the game well into the future. With leaderboards and player created levels that are to be tried and tested and seemingly unlimited makes the game worth every penny. Who knew that rolling around a marble could be so much fun?