XBLIG Review: UpBot Goes Up

“Creative Block Conga That’s a Great Puzzler.”

An XboxHornet review by Mercedes.

If you have read any of my reviews, you should be able to glean that I have a huge hard-on for puzzle games: I just love flexing my noggin in the comfort of my own couch. The things I look for in my puzzlers are originality, “zen-ality” and Quick To Learn Long Time To Master…ality. Upbot Goes Up, developed by Ishisoft, mostly fits the bill, and it’s a great puzzler, don’t get me wrong, but let me just get the negative things out of the way: It’s not a Tetris Attack clone. Dammit.

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Now that that is out of the way, let’s get to the meat of the matter. All the blocks move one direction and that’s forward. There are four colored blocks each corresponding to the controller face buttons. Pressing these buttons makes the blocks move up. Your mission, should you choose to accept it or not, is to move these blocks to specific places in the block arena. When you have to, one block can push another block or a bunch of blocks. There are also spaces that warp blocks around the map which you’ll have to keep in mind when you’re doing the block conga line across the play area.

The beginner levels are pretty simple and they didn’t give me much trouble, but as usual for the genre, the later levels will surely give you a headache… A delicious headache.

The one negative that I can think of is that there’s no real character to this game. Sure the blocks have cute faces, but there isn’t anything memorable about it. Think about IloMilo, for those who’ve played it- There is none is that uber cuteness and personality in this game.  However, UpBot Goes Up is still a good game in its right; I just wish there was something compelling character wise.

Game Score: 8/10.

Download a free demo of the game here.