I love having some casual AR games to play in my free time. Today I came across a great little physics-based block-stacking AR game called Let’s Build AR. It’s a fantastic little Augmented Reality game that I highly recommend downloading.
How to Play Let’s Build AR?
The idea of the game is really simple. your goal is to stack up cubes as high as possible while trying to maintain a stable structure. If the structure collapses, it’s game over.
The cube will quickly rotate around the previous cube’s axis. You have to tap anywhere on the screen to lock it in place. Now, the tricky part is that it’s a physics-based game, so to build a high tower, you also need to make sure it’s stable. You can’t just quickly tap on the screen and hope for the best, you are very likely to fail. It’s also isn’t smart to try to build only when the cube is on top of the previous cube because this leads to a very unstable tower.
I found myself first making sure I have a wide stable square surface and then continue building on top of it. The problem is you don’t always get to achieve everything you’ve planned to do. The automatic rotation of the cube gets faster and faster the higher you build.
This game requires fast reaction time, but even with a fast reaction time, you are going to make some mistakes along the way. Therefore you need to compensate for those mistakes by trying to strengthen and stabilize the base by building in the opposite direction by building towards the bottom, not towers the top part.
The game remembers your best score. You score is based on the number of levels of cubes you were able to build one on top of the other.
AR Experience
Now, in my opinion, theLet’s Build AR has a fantastic presentation. First of all, it intelligently uses the vertical space to create an immersive and fun gameplay experience that plays beautifully in augmented reality.
The game can be played in small space, although you can easily find that the structure overflows the size of the gameplay area. the thing is that it isn’t a big problem for two reasons: You can still continue playing like that because you don’t need to be physically close to the cube, and second, you probably are not going to get to the point where the tower is that wide, you will fail way before that.
The game’s presentation is great because you actually create really nice artistic structures as you play, without even having an intention to do so.
The cubes have a nice design with a white circle in the middle to give you a better understanding of the structure without relying on being able to separate between the different shades of the shadow areas. You can clearly tell the structure design no matter where you are standing. It’s a very important visual aid that can be easily overlooked, so kudos to the developer of employing this type of design. The gameplay is also followed by beautiful smooth and circular confetti-like visual effects that just make the gameplay experience feel more cheerful and fun—Same goes to the music.
I’ve played it outdoors and I must say that primitive shapes render really nice outdoors. I assume this is done using ARKit based on the system requirements, the adaptable lighting, and the scanning process. There was a time where the sun shined through the clouds and it made the tower look really nice with all those shades of purple. I also enjoyed watching the tower topple down as a single unit.
By the way, if you fail, you do have one option to go a step back in favor of watching an advertisement. You can do it only once.
Conclusion
Let’s Build AR is a fun and challenging game. I have played many types of block stacking games like AR Robot Runner, Let’s Stack AR, rBlocks AR, Stack AR, Tetris+ AR, and others. Many of them are quite alike and I think that Let’s Build AR does bring something else to the table. It plays and looks different than other games that I’ve played in this genre.
There is no nice opening screen and The UI isn’t impressive, but the game looks great and plays great. Of course, it could have been better with maybe different textures as you go higher, having a global leaderboard but overall there isn’t too much that you can do with this type of game. It is what it is, and its beauty lies in its simplicity and visual presentation in augmented reality.
It’s a fun casual augmented reality game that I’m sure many of you will enjoy playing. It’s also free-to-play in the app store—Recommended.
Download Let’s Build AR free from the App Store here.