When it comes to gameplay, however,
Ball Breakers starts to shine. It may have a few problems -- the courses get devilishly hard rather quick, and some of them are bad enough to make you want to throw your controller down in frustration -- but it’s a damned fun ride, and one you’ll probably be coming back to.
In this game, you’ll be taking the role of a criminal in the future who has had their legs sawed off and replaced with a rolling ball. Fortunately, you’re not made of flesh, so it’s not all that terrible of a punishment. Err... never mind. The plotline behind this game is near nonexistent, but that’s not going to be why you’re playing the game.
Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses -- some are fast but weak, others are strong but slow. Because of this, they will have to take on different strategies to win in the different sorts of competitions that make up the game. There are a multitude of match types. Some are relatively standard: Last Man Rolling, where you beat the tar out of the opponents; Gauntlet, where you have to race to the end of a level without getting mauled; Tag, where you have to collect tokens in a certain amount of time. Others are actually quite interesting: Powerball requires you to throw balls at a magnetic goal of sorts, which seems easy, but is often non-trivial, and King of the Hill requires you to stay on top of a platform longer than anyone else. Every event is timed, and if you don’t complete it in the time allotted, you lose, no matter how close to winning you were. Most of them have things you must do besides not running out of time, such as finishing in first place in the Race levels or making a certain number of goals in Powerball.
To keep the fun factor up, you can only do a few courses at a time. As you complete them, new Prisons open up where you can do even more battles. Each prison has anywhere from a few to a whole hell of a lot of arenas to compete in, but you don’t have to complete them all to advance. This means that you can skip a particularly difficult arena and come back to it when your skills are a bit more improved.
For all the variety in Ball Breakers, you’ll find that it’s hard to get bored with what you’re doing. Problems arise, however, when the difficulty level starts ramping up and you can’t beat two or three different arenas to advance. And getting a gold medal, which usually means doing something in record time, is often an exercise in futility. It can be done, but it’s certainly not easy.
