Back in the mid-2000s, GarageGames gained a dedicated cult following for their Marble Blast games, in which you moved a marble through intricate 3D environments with intuitively designed physics and easy to learn but hard to master gameplay that made them excellent for quick bursts (perfect for the very early days of Xbox Live Arcade via the Gold and Ultra instalments). Despite the series’ popularity, it mostly disappeared due to Garage somehow losing the rights in a baffling string of events involving the studio shutting down, relaunching and being acquired by larger companies.
However, Marble Blast has lived on through the efforts of the fan community keeping the series alive through custom map packs and mods, and more recently a team made up of former GarageGames members and fans now called The Marble Collective. The latter released a spiritual successor in 2018 called Marble It Up!, which reprises a lot of Marble Blast‘s mechanics, power-ups, presentation and its level of quality to make for a great marble roller worth checking out.
It’s a simple game at first glance, controlling a marble that needs to roll and jump its way to the end of each stage. As you move around, you gain momentum that increases when you go down slopes or jump continually and decreases when you go up slopes. Using this momentum to achieve greater leaps and move around levels faster is a skill that will regularly be tested in the many levels you’ll visit.
From obstacles such as bumpers and moving blocks that’ll fling you off, to icy and gravitational floors that effect your momentum, and single use power-ups like speed boosts, super jumps and glides, there’s plenty to help and hinder you. Levels themselves are quite varied too, featuring linear obstacle courses, open-ended areas containing gems you must collect to open the exit, breakneck downhill slopes where you can become uncontrollably fast, and more.
All of this is made workable by the precise controls, which allow you to make the slightest tweaks to your rolling, even when you’re in the air if you need to correct your course upon landing. The way your movement is affected by slopes, half-pipes and drops lends a lot of versatility to both the levels and how you can navigate them, so there’s always some new way to move around, reach new areas or get to the end even faster.
This is further encouraged by the medals system, rewarding you for how quickly you clear each stage with a silver, gold or even platinum medal if you’re especially nimble. These medals aren’t required to beat the game; you get a bronze medal simply for reaching the goal, and you only need to finish six out of every chapter’s nine stages to unlock the next chapter. But for those who enjoy mastering a game, the medals (along with unlockable marble skins found in deviously secret areas) will offer enough reason to tackle Marble It Up!‘s challenge.
And challenge is the fitting word, because things get tricky. The first few chapters are quite manageable, as they gradually introduce each new mechanic with enough leniency for you to understand them. But then the difficulty starts to ascend, very steeply. Stages become longer, filled with obstacles you’ll need to overcome with highly specific timing, and a few of them must be cleared in one go without any checkpoints.
If things become too tough, you can toggle a rewind option in the menu that’ll let you reverse time for as far back as needed, though this prevents you from getting medals or marble skins. It’s a fair compromise, letting you come to grips with the stage but still demanding you beat them as intended if you want to progress. The consistency of the controls and mechanics will ensure you’ll unlock all the chapters with enough work.
However, the stages in the final chapters are the steepest challenge of all, with sparse checkpoints, deeply complex layouts, and set-pieces that require such an understanding of the game’s mechanics that they’ll only be beaten by experts and maniacs. While it’s impressive to see how far the gameplay gets pushed, it’s also frustrating that most players won’t be able to reach the end.
At the very least, there’s a lot to keep you busy elsewhere with weekly challenges, where you play through a set of stages with modified settings that change up how you play, and custom levels designed with the official Marble It Up! Leven Creation Kit that can be downloaded through Steam Workshop. This kit is freely available for anyone, so you can grab it and make your own levels if you’d like!
Marble It Up! is a very solid game on all fronts, including its presentation. The graphics are quite attractive with colourful backgrounds and cleanly designed structures that make it easy to see where everything is, while the smooth consistent framerate ensures the controls are always responsive. The various moves, power-ups and obstacles are punctuated with nicely distinct sound effects, and Solovox’s high-tempo electronic soundtrack compliments the gameplay’s fast pace.
An expanded version of the game called Marble It Up! Mayhem was released in 2019 as a launch title for the Apple Arcade subscription service. Multiplayer was introduced in this release, allowing players to challenge each other in uniquely designed arenas through a series of modes. These include hunts to collect the most gems, sumo matches where you need to stay in one area to acquire points, a zombie mode in which players avoid a zombie ball chasing after them, and soccer matches that have you kicking a massive ball into the goal.
There’s a whole host of new marble skins to unlock by completing challenges or finding them in secret areas, along with coloured trails and cosmetic hats, glasses and the like which you can acquire with shards obtained from beating the levels. More shards are obtained as you beat stages at better times and completing more of them in a session, encouraging a kind of compulsive play that’s perhaps a bit too close to microtransaction-type systems (although there are no microtransactions).
The biggest change is the radically remixed single player campaign. Many of the levels have been redesigned to varying degrees, incorporating new gimmicks such as bouncy orange walls and adding checkpoints to some of the more challenging stages. Entirely new levels have also been added, which even includes four brand new bonus chapters that unlock after collecting a certain amount of gold medals; expanding the game’s stage count from 60 to 117!
Not only that, but nearly all of the final chapter’s stages have been completely replaced with a much more manageable, though still challenging, batch of levels that’ll satisfy most players. The original levels can be still found at the very end of the bonus chapters, a fitting place to truly test the die-hards on their marble rolling skills. Mayhem was available until the end of August 2024, when it was removed from Apple Arcade; a frustratingly common fate for games on that service.
Thankfully, Mayhem was ported to Windows and consoles in 2023 as Marble It Up! Ultra, albeit with many of the singe player levels re-ordered and a few replaced with all new stages to accommodate controllers. The controls were also subtly tweaked in the acceleration and turning, making for a slightly smoother experience to returning players. This is the most readily available version of the game and the one worth getting, especially as the PC version includes the original release (retroactively titled Marble It Up! Classic) for free.
LINKS:
The official Marble It Up! website – https://marbleitup.com/
A Reddit “ask me anything” with various members of Marble It Up!‘s development team, talking about the Ultra and Classic releases along with the original Marble Blast games – https://www.reddit.com/r/XboxSeriesX/comments/15ybpas/we_are_the_creators_of_marble_it_up_ultra_ask_us/
