For some reason, no matter how many games there are in this world based around stacking up different coloured and different shaped blocks, there’s always room for one more… then another one… and now, yet another – ‘Tricky Towers’. Tricky Towers is a physics-based tower building arcade game with a single player campaign and local and online multiplayer modes. Developed and published by WeirdBeard, this game puts a twist on the classic idea of tower building with time trial matches, survival matches and puzzle matches all of which you can play alone or through local or online multiplayer.

Tricky Towers is free this month on PlayStation Plus (August ’16), so if you like arcade games then I recommend you get it now because the best part of this game is the online matches – and while it’s free there are so many people playing you’re almost guaranteed to find a match (but who knows how long the popularity will last?)

It’s hard to find a gamer, or person for that matter, who hasn’t played Tetris or a game similar; so when it comes to gameplay – while it’s simple – there is a lot to live up to. For a tower building game like this, the gameplay has to be smooth, it has to be familiar but it also has to bring something new to the table or else it will just get lost in the endless supply of tower building games that already exist. Luckily for WeirdBeard, they seem to have brought just the right amount of originality to their game to make me want to keep going back for more.

There are three different game modes – survival, puzzle and race/time trial. All of these work fantastically and what makes them interesting enough for you to keep playing is the magic elements of the levels. In puzzle, you cant touch the laser line and you can magic up vines to keep a selection of blocks sturdy and in survival and races you can screw over other players with different spells to mess up their towers. The magic isn’t excessive though, so it keeps the main tower building element the focus, which is great.

The game sticks with the familiar blocks that everyone’s used to. Although, differing to the likes of Tetris, the most useful blocks in Tricky towers are the blocks with corners – the beloved straight line block that all of us know and love isn’t really what you want. BUT the main point is, WeirdBeard have stuck to what us gamers know and love which makes the game easily playable from the start.

The music and the sound affects are chirpy and fun, but they’re very repetitive. The characters have one or two sounds they make through every level and the music is repeated constantly. If you’re playing an online match of puzzle for example, you better get used to hearing the same song repeated over and over and over again. It’s a shame really, because while the music is good and the sounds work for what they are, it gets boring after a while. I find that much of the charm of a game is in it’s soundtrack and WeirdBeard could have done more in this part of the Tricky Towers experience.

The graphics though, are great. They’re bright and simplistic and done wonderfully. It’s a vibrant game, which is appropriate since, you know, the game is supposed to be fun and light-hearted. I liked that each different level type was accompanied by a different scene. Games like this often opt for a level design by world or through a certain amount of levels, but I liked the difference this offered so you weren’t sitting there staring at the same thing for level upon level. That’s in single player anyway, this doesn’t quite work as well with multiplayer – if you choose a game type then you will be stuck staring at the same thing over and over and over again.

One particular thing I did like was that while you’re playing you get a block guide. This is basically a shaded area of the screen that will tell you what position your block will end up in. It’s helpful, because Tricky Towers has one other slightly different element to their game: your blocks move and place more precisely and if you move it slightly too far to the left, it could mean game over. Of course if you want a more challenging game play experience, this might not be what you want, but as of right now I’m not sure there’s a way to turn this option off.

Overall, the game is good. Tower building is a tale as old as time in gaming, but Tricky Towers has just enough originality to not only make it a fun and enjoyable gaming experience, but addictive too. I can’t tell you how many times I said to myself “okay, last round…” “no, okay, this is the last round…” “Oh wait no, that round sucked, this one, this is the last round…” “Oh screw it.” I ended up playing until 1am.