Pile-Up lets you build vertical cities on tiny islands. However, the building game with the simple concept is more demanding than we would have suspected.
During the Steam Next Fest, gamers were able to try out numerous game demos for free in the last few days. We took a closer look at the construction game Pile-Up, which entices with a charming graphic style and a simple but unusual concept and is scheduled for release in spring 2023. Find out what we liked and what we didn”t like about the game here.
All beginnings are small
We start at Pile-Up on a tiny island, with nothing but an empty platform to serve as the foundation for our first buildings. Little by little, we fill the available space with residential and utility buildings, factories and gardens. Again and again we can also expand the building site with additional foundations. Thus, slowly but surely, a real city piles up:
But we can”t choose our buildings freely, instead there is a round system: we are given some buildings, which all have to be placed in order to get the next buildings. Most of them are residential buildings in different sizes, but there are also many other buildings with their own rules, such as:
- Foundations: Expand our building ground by placing them on the edge of the city.
- Factories: Produce certain types of buildings for several turns.
- Casinos: Can make inhabitants happier or sadder, to be determined on placement
- Dumpster: Allows you to leave a building unplaced and still proceed to the next round.
More important, however, are supply buildings that meet the needs of our inhabitants. These must be carefully placed to avoid destruction. For example, a generator placed next to an oil stove can cause a destructive explosion, as you can also see in the trailer:
Such misfortunes and a lack of care for our inhabitants must be avoided as much as possible. If their satisfaction drops below a certain level, we lose the game and have to start all over again. When we played the game, however, it was not a great challenge to keep our inhabitants happy.
What we liked, what remains open?
This is what Pile-Up is already doing well
- Atmosphere and graphics: Day and night changes and the atmospheric soundtrack create an idyllic atmosphere. You can”t expect high-end graphics here, but we like the harmonious graphic style. The animations when placing the buildings are also nice to look at. Only some of the details in the building transitions could still use some fine-tuning.
- Motivating puzzling: Even after an hour of constant stacking, there is no boredom. It is simply motivating to place buildings as ideally as possible, fill gaps perfectly, and watch our city slowly grow. The division into turns also makes the whole thing extremely entertaining to play.
- Tactical destruction: Since we are no longer allowed to demolish what we have built, we can also use the destruction effects of various buildings to get rid of unwelcome houses if we are particularly clever. This does not happen very often, but it is an interesting challenge.
This could still be improved
- Building information: After constructing buildings, we can no longer select them to get information about them. This is a problem with factories, for example, because they all look the same. This makes it difficult to keep track of them.
- More content: In the finished game, there will hopefully not only be the one island that we cultivate in the demo. Missions with clearly defined tasks, a campaign or alternative game modes could also expand Pile-Up. Because otherwise the game will probably run out of steam pretty quickly.
- Better-lived cities: When placing buildings, nice little details are already generated for our houses. However, there could be significantly more of them to make our city look more varied. If a few inhabitants of our city were actually to be seen, it would look less lifeless.
If you”ve now got a hankering for Pile-Up yourself, you can still try out the (Demo on Steam) which is still available despite the conclusion of Steam Next.
Editor”s Verdict
Pile-Up was already a lot of fun in the demo, and I”d like to continue playing right away. It”s the perfect building game for in between, because I can play here for just a few minutes, but also sink several hours. I have not yet been able to find out whether the fun of stacking wears off at some point.
But if we have already seen all the content in the demo, that would be wasted potential. Because the developers have already shown a lot of creativity with the simple game principle and I”m sure they could make even more out of it. Judging by the state of the demo, we can definitely expect a solid game here, with which you can have some relaxed building fun for a while.
