I love treasure in games. If there’s a perk that gives me more gold or an increased chance to get loot, I’ll use it every time, even if it means fights will be a little tougher. If there’s a character that can steal stuff, I’ll make sure to rob every enemy I can to ensure I don’t miss out on any sweet, sweet loot.
But for all of my days of amassing countless types of goodies, one thing I’ve never done is drop it, two at a time, into a narrow area. I guess all of that loot has to go somewhere, and putting it in treasure chests is just kind of a given considering that treasure chests are the standard container for loot.
Regardless of how this sport of stacking and unlocking treasure came to be, it’s here to stay! Treasure Stack is a 1-4 player game where small stacks of two items drop at a time. Instead of directly moving them as you would in Tetris, you run around the bottom. Your goal is to match chests with their corresponding key; doing so unlocks all connected chests of the same color and awards you points. You continue doing this as long as possible until you’re inevitably overwhelmed by treasure, or you cause your foe(s) to become overwhelmed.
In addition to moving, jumping, setting things down, and matching chests up with keys, you can also use your handy dandy grappling hook to grab stacks as they fall. This allows you to quickly grab them so you can place them wherever you want, which in turn causes the next drop to start sooner. This is important because you’re up against a clock of sorts – every so often you’ll get a set of blocks added on top of everything, but the more points you can score before they’re added, the less bad blocks you’ll get. Faster play also allows for combos, which means more points, which means less bad blocks added, and it all creates a fast-paced loop.
Treasure Stack is definitely an “easy to learn, hard to master” kind of game. When blocks are slowly falling, it’s easy to match them up and clear things out, but dealing with them when your area is almost full and everything is moving super fast made me freeze up like facing off against “Through the Fire and Flames” in Guitar Hero 3. Luckily there’s a fair amount of gameplay in between those two extremes, and it gets even more hectic when you’re playing against someone else.
Unfortunately, there are no AI opponents in Treasure Stack. If you don’t have any local or online friends to play with, you’re left with the game’s online matchmaking. This would be perfectly fine except I had a terrible time trying to find a match. I tried various times across a full week in April, and then tried here and there over the last couple of months and only managed to find one match the whole time. Some of these times I only waited 5 minutes, while others I waited for over 20 minutes. Surprisingly the one time I did find a match it only took a single minute, so the game is certainly capable of matching quickly if people are around. To make matters worse, you aren’t able to do anything at all while waiting – you’re just shown a loading screen while it tries to find the match. If I could’ve at least played while waiting and been pulled out of my own solo game, I really wouldn’t have minded waiting for so long in the hopes of finding someone to play against.
This lack of online opponents is a real shame because the game is really built for online competition. For every 300 points you earn you’ll unlock a random character or grappling hook that you can show off in any of the game modes. None of these affect gameplay at all, but a lot of them really are cool, like using a ninja, dragon, or sultan equipped with a dragon claw, round shield, or even a shuriken! In addition to items you unlock randomly, there are items to unlock from the various competitive seasons online. Unfortunately, it’s essentially impossible to unlock them without a great deal of luck to find matches in addition to the skill needed to actually win the matches when they’re found.
If Treasure Stack had AI opponents, I think I’d have loads of fun with it. The game gets so chaotic and stressful battling against another player, but playing solo gets repetitive fast. People who have friends online to play with or who have people they can play with locally will likely enjoy Treasure Stack. If you have neither of those, the stresses of increased speed and your own high score to beat solo aren’t likely to keep you interested unless you’re a huge fan of the genre and want something new.
Treasure Stack is available on Nintendo Switch (reviewed), Xbox One, and Steam (Windows).
A review code was provided for this review.