Super Mega Balance Party 4

Remember how, in science/math class as a child your teacher would give you a scale, and you kept putting things in it , at different positions and kept changing the stuff to see what would happen? Ever stacked a bunch of objects(books, cans etc) to see how high you could get them before they toppled? Well if so, then Super Mega Balance Party 4 may be a familiar game to you.

SMBP4 is a stacking game, in the same vein as the perfect balance series. You have a bunch of various shapes, and you must balance them. Being physics games, they naturally rely on surface pressure for friction, so your circles roll, your cubes slide a bit, and your long, flat boards don't really budge much at all. The overall goal in SMBP4 is to build a tower of X blocks high without too many mess ups and without running out of time.


The game pieces are rather simple, yet are diverse enough that the levels are not generic. You have three basic surface types, normal, ice and bouncy, as well as static balance boards, and ones that teeter and totter like a scale. Normal ground works as you would expect, as does ice, the tricky one is bouncy flooring. From what I could see, bouncy flooring physics was pretty much a crapshoot, and kind of a hassle to deal with. As for the shapes, you have circles, wooden planks, boxes, and metal boxes. Circles roll unless another object is there to stop them, planks are generally used for supporting highers structures because of their stability, crates are your standard block, and metal crates are like crates, but they seem to weigh as much as 3 crates.

Graphically, its pretty polished, but it could've used more variety. The menus are pretty, and the backgrounds really do serve to set the environment. It may have helped to add more block textures though, because as you can see in the screenshot above, every single stone block uses the same pattern. More background/foreground variety for the different levels would have also been nice. It never hurts to mix things up with graphical assets.

Would I recommend this game? What I would instead recommend is that you go play Perfect Balance 3, and if you like it, then play Super Mega Balance Party 4. The latter levels are annoying with the advent of bounce flooring, but if you like stacking games, it certainly should appeal to you.