Game Reviews

A Game With Balls

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A Game With Balls

While a touch shinier these days, the Android Market is still making a pig’s ear of highlighting newly released games.

Take A Game With Balls, for example. It’s an impeccable iOS port with bags of casual appeal, and yet if you type its full name into the Market you actually have to scroll down to find it, while a plethora of similarly named (mostly rubbish) titles clamour above it for your gaming cash.

It’s not the Hindenburg Disaster, but it’s still something of a tragedy that such a fun, slightly trippy-styled, experience might bounce by the average player.

Dodge Ball

Puppy Punch Productions’s game is ridiculously easy to pick up, yet there’s an impressive amount of variety and re-playability packed into its handful of stages.

You control a cannon trapped in the unwinnable situation of being rained on by increasing numbers of balls, squares, and the odd near screen-filling planet.

With only one life, the aim is to survive as long as possible by firing circular bullets to bounce enemies safely away, and eventually off the screen.

The game is built around an impressive physics engine, which bestows all the tumbling antagonists with unique properties that need to be learned and controlled. Some balls will bounce slowly off each other, while others travel in small clusters across the screen, and rectangular shapes fall on you like lead balloons.

Aside from occasional hiccups, like enemies getting clustered into immovable stacks, the physics hold up well even when the screen is teeming with deadly objects.

Bouncing around

With a choice of tilt aiming or a simpler tap option (where bullets fire wherever you touch the screen), A Game With Balls initially feels like a casual blast.

Once you’ve survived longer than a minute, however, the deluge of enemies can quickly overwhelm novice players. Ammo recharges, but it’s easy to run out if you’re just firing at everything that moves - often leaving you with an empty chamber at the worst possible moment.

Instead, sporadic, carefully targeted shots are the best defence, with the game encouraging you to aim for risky ricochets to help clear the screen.

With higher scores awarded both for long-term survival and ammo conservation, you need sharpshooter skills to earn enough points to unlock the four different stages.

Each one is themed, with different music, backgrounds, and enemies (the chill-out room sounds of steamFUNKED were a personal favourite), and they’re distinct enough to keep you returning for just one more go. The Hard and Hardcore modes are there to test the mettle of those looking for a sterner challenge.

Bouncing back

Although you can unlock all the levels, including a Classic mode (harking back to the game’s Flash roots), in under an hour, the lure of OpenFeint leaderboards and achievements make A Game With Balls a pretty addictive prospect.

Admittedly, even with the unpredictable new enemies populating the different aesthetically striking levels, it’s a little samey. But the promise of more stages to come in future updates means this smart little blaster won’t be rolling off your handset any time soon.

A Game With Balls

Far from being a load of balls, this is a bouncy blaster with bags of funky style and personality and style
Score
Paul Devlin
Paul Devlin
A newspaper reporter turned games journo, Paul's first ever console was an original white Game Boy (still in working order, albeit with a yellowing tinge and 30 second battery life). Now he writes about Android with a style positively dripping in Honeycomb, stuffed with Gingerbread and coated with Froyo