Some Assembly Required: A Brief ZUP! XS Review

Can you believe we’re already nearly halfway through May? I thought completing my first game in my backlog quest would have involved more fanfare, but a win is a win. May’s short game is complete! 🎉

I picked up ZUP! XS in a ZUP! bundle for cheap during a Steam sale. I already had most of them, may as well round out the collection. ZUP! XS was one of the last installments in the ZUP! franchise. It was also the first to deviate from the original formula of clicking randomly to solve the puzzles.

In this version, you had to build the course yourself with a limited number of blocks. While more engaging than its predecessors, my biggest gripe was if I had to reset the puzzle, it wiped out all my block placements. Rebuilding from scratch became tedious very quickly. I would have preferred the ability to make modifications as needed.

I was wrong initially in saying there were thousands of achievements tied to this. There were only 97, a far cry from the expected 2k+ achievements. I’m grateful for that, as I can’t imagine dragging this out for much longer than the hour and change I invested in this.

Bottom line, I would only recommend this game if:

• it’s on sale
• you care about Steam profile aesthetics and want to decorate it with these achievements
• you don’t have anything better to do for 1-2 hours

With this done and dusted, I can devote my attention to my long game this month, which I’m looking to kick off this week.