Colour busting fun an games
If you take a little bit of colour and shape-busting puzzlers like Tetris, Klax and Columns, then you'll probably end up with this little known game. It's not exactly a classic of the genre but for die hard fans of this type of thing, it makes for a curious addition to the collection. The concept is pretty much the same as Columns, with the player presented with a series of falling blocks of varying colours. Your task is to arrange them so that they fall into piles of similarly coloured blocks, whereby they will disappear and earn you some points, depending on the configuration that you have managed to create. Unlike some other similar games, the blocks here will keep moving until they hit an obstacle, so that blocks which fall together don't necessarily stay in the same place. This makes for an interesting additional challenge as you always have to consider what's going to happen after you've made your move. Before each level, you're informed how many lines you have to make in order to complete it and this target-based system again makes a nice change from the 'just keep playing until you mess up' approach of the original Tetris. You get awarded different points for the kind of lines that you make, with diagonals being the trickiest to create and therefore worth the most and again this adds nicely to the challenge. Taken on its own terms, Stack Up is a perfectly acceptable little puzzler. The visuals are decent enough and the controls simple to get the hang of and it's only when you consider that it is pretty much identical to Columns that you realise it doesn't bring anything new to the table. Thus, it's only really worth playing if you desperately need another such puzzler in your life.
