Game Review: Stairway to Heaven! (Mobile – Free to Play)

Everyone wants to reach Heaven one day, but it’s our life decisions which decide whether we go to Heaven. Start as a child and keep making good decisions to grow and reach Heaven!

Hold your finger on the screen to move up the stairs to Heaven. Every few steps, you’ll be asked to make a ‘life’ decision or answer a question. Choose the right one and you’ll continue on your journey, but choose the wrong one and you’ll fall down some steps.

Nothing more than an inconvenience though as you’re quickly up on your feet and moving upwards again. It would be a good metaphor for life if the game wasn’t such a pile of trash.

The over-riding thought that will be spinning through most brains once they actually manage to reach Heaven will be ‘why even bother’? After 20-30 minutes of climbing stairs, half of which is watching/trying to avoid ads. You’ll be asked to decorate Heaven with coins you may have earned before going back to the start and doing it all again.

If, like me, you did everything possible to avoid ads, chances are you’ll make it to Heaven with no coins. Rendering the entire experience pointless.

Now, moaning about ad spam in a free to play game is akin to sounding like a broken record these days. Even we find ourselves glossing over them now. However, when we play something that is so egregious, so twisted in its attempts to make you watch, we can’t ignore it.

Stairway to Heaven does everything it possibly can to make you watch ads. From a forced pop-up every so often to constant ‘rewards’ if you watch an ad to the punishment steps where if you don’t watch an ad, the devil will send you down 30 steps. It’s sickening in just how desperate it is and the more you avoid watching them, the more it throws at you. So pathetic is this game, that right before the end, it throws a ‘devil’ step at you. Here though, it’s not about sending you back down. Instead he will take all your coins if you don’t watch an ad. Thus rendering your arrival in Heaven to decorate, pointless. If that doesn’t make you hate this game, nothing will.

It’s not like gameplay is particularly fun either. The life decisions are hilariously stupid. One moment you’re being given a choice of how to deal with a cheating spouse then the next about if you should pee in a pool. There’s always a right answer making this ‘life’ decision scripted rather than a way to develop a character.

Hell has got to be better than this.