Marble It Up! Ultra is genuinely one of the most purely fun games I’ve played in ages. The levels are challenging without ever feeling unfair and the steady stream of unlockables keep you playing for hours, while the amount of content is more than enough to validate the price.
Marble It Up! Ultra
Developer: Marble It Up, LLC
Price: $30
Platforms: PS4, PS5 (reviewed), Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC
MonsterVine was provided with a PS5 code for review
I remember first seeing Marble It Up! on a Let’s Play channel back in 2019. I thought it looked incredibly fun but got distracted by something or other and forgot about it for a while, occasionally remembering it and planning to play it. Now, with the Ultra version releasing this month, I finally got to play the complete and updated version of the game, and it lived up to all of my expectations.
The base concept of Marble It Up! Ultra is simple: you’re a marble and you need to roll towards an end goal at the end of an obstacle course of some sort. You can roll, jump, and use a few basic powers after obtaining pick-ups, like super speed and a super jump. Some courses are short, others are long, and most allow for (and sometimes encourage) messing around with momentum to go as fast as possible and potentially skip areas.
This expansive amount of room that you’re given to play around with (and the speed at which you can restart a stage) makes it incredibly fun and easy to try to beat the overall fair time limits for each rank. Bouncing around at high speeds is a joy, as Marble It Up! Ultra nails momentum in a way that few other games do. The later levels can go on a bit long at times, but even this is hardly an issue when rolling around, in general, is so simple and fun.
Nailing the times on these stages earns you currency that can be used to buy new marbles, accessories, and trails for your marble. It’s pretty easy to rack up a good amount of currency and the customizable items are all visually appealing, adding another layer of accomplishment to each stage and each higher-ranked time you achieve.
There are 60 stages in the main campaign mode and even more in the bonus stages, which can get especially wild. No matter your level of experience or preference when it comes to difficulty, there are plenty of levels for you to enjoy. There are a few multiplayer modes like Soccer and Sumo, but they feel more like distractions than the remarkably tight single-player experience.
The energetic music and incredibly colorful visuals add a sense of liveliness to the already frantic gameplay, making it easy to get lost in the game’s flow as you jettison your marble from here to there. It’s a sharp looking game with visuals that suit the straightforward but pleasant gameplay.
The Final Word
Marble It Up! Ultra is one of the most plainly fun games around. Soaring through stages, finding new tricks and making new shortcuts while experimenting with momentum, and trying to clear tight times makes for an intensely exciting but easily digestible experience that I can’t recommend enough.
MonsterVine Rating: 4.5 out of 5 – Great
