Madballs in Babo Invasion (PC) Review
I wonder how that press conference must have gone. “I have a GREAT idea for a video game! Let’s make it about a bunch of balls. They are at war, see, and have all kinds of guns and stuff and roll around and fight each other!” “But sir, we just bought an over 20 year old licence about balls without guns! We cant use this!” “Sure we can! Let’s just put a few in the game!” “BRILLIANT!” Seriously, this is about the best I can come up with, but whatever it took to cause this game to be, it’s to all our benefit that it happened!
The story to this game is not very deep, but it fits the feel of the game perfectly. Oculus Orbus and Horn-Head are blasting through the galaxy in a high speed space-chase to some as of yet unnamed artifact when Horn-Head gets the one good shot he needs to take his rival down. Depending on which campaign you decide to play, you will either follow Oculus in his adventure with his new allies or Horn-Head and his new hoard of goons eager for the power in a race to this artifact, each with a fairly light, but solid story backing the adventure. Both sides will basically be playing the same maps, though, so if you don’t care enough about the stories to follow them both, you wont miss out on much.
The game itself is a top-down shooter in you roll, shoot, and puzzle your way through in classic arcade fashion with a wide variety of weapons ranging from a simple machine gun, to a super powered lazer cannon, to grenade launchers, to ninja star launchers. The selection of weapons is absolutely amazing. You will also have a selection of characters, each with unique powers and abilities to choose from…. but there are a few catches stopping you from going hog-wild: Physics and you will have to earn the ability to use them by playing the game. Choose to play alone or with friends, co-op or vs, but play!
But why mention physics? Simply put, you are a ball, and guns have recoil. Different weapons will have different strength recoil, but it will change how you want to use each or which ones you might want to pick where all the more. A laser gun is amazing, but when you fly back a few feet for using it, it’s probably not the best weapon when you are up on a bridge over lava. This game will make you consider such things as part of your strategy. The controls behind all of this is also very well done, adapting the WASD controls we have all come to know and love absolutely perfectly.
Sound-wise, this game will not impress you, but it will charm you. The voices are amusing, but rarely enough used to never over stay their welcome, and the guns themselves sound about like you would expec them to. Even the music fits this style. There is not alot of different songs on here, but it will charm when you focus on it, yet settle to the background nicely when the guns are blazing and the enemy is swarming around you.
And they will look really nice while swarming. I am hard pressed to think of a single thing that crossed my screen with anything but high resolution bitmaps and generally looking great. On my system, I was able to up the resolution to 1440×900 (my monitor’s max) with liquid smooth frame-rate almost all the time. I saw almost only because the engine does show a small weakness. If you are too high up over the base floor, the engine starts to chug a little. It isn’t enough to wreck the game, and it doesn’t matter what is actually around you. An odd, bug, but being a graphical flaw, I should mention it. (And as a side note, do NOT play this with Xfire running… they just dont get along and your frame-rate will suffer regardless of power or settings… badly.)
FINAL VERDICT: This game is the very defenition of a fun fast paced action game that is insanely easy to get into. It does not have a deep plot, alot of complex controls, or even any real gimmicks. It’s just solid fun… and at $10, there is no reason to say no to this game.
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2 Comments
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09 Nov 2009, 12:04 am
Hey mate,
Mind throwing me a quick email? Completely lost a lot of peoples details when formatted my computer.
09 Nov 2009, 1:32 pm
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