oof...my head...
I want to like this game, I really do! It's faced paced, it's action-packed, the concept is clever enough...
Alas, I can't find myself recommending Battle Ball Brawl. The biggest problem it has is the control. Oh, God, the control. Anyone who's attempted playing a first person shooter on a Wii knows how frustrating it is that aiming your weapon also turns the camera. Those two functions just don't mix. In a game like Goldeneye 007, the player moves the camera but the weapon stays stiff as a board. That's fine, as is a control setup like that of any Call of Duty game where the camera and weapon are moved with different analog sticks. In Battle Ball Brawl, however, the mouse aims not only the weapon, but also the camera, making aiming very slippery and difficult to control. You're lucky to line up your crosshairs with your enemy for a fraction of a second, which doesn't help much when most of the weapons have insultingly low rates of fire.
Aside from the control, the game pretty much does everything right. It's a standard third-person shooter geared toward multiplayer, but also sporting AI for those who showed up to this party stag. The main gimmick is that you can leap onto different planets in a deep-space shooting environment. There's a lot of potential in this concept to create tense, fast-paced strategic battles like something out of Ender's Game where gravity must be manipulated to your advantage. However, the inaccuracy of the weapons and aforementioned sloppy controls make such scenarios impossible, and the best strategy instantly becomes "rush up to your nearest opponent, stand still and fire away." This kind of gameplay delivers no kind of flow and is just outright boring.
The sound direction is good. Nothing to complain about. In addition, the graphics are, while nothing to behold by modern standards, pleasing to look at.
This game reminds me a lot of Forsaken 64, which also tried to incorporate shooting in an augmented-gravity environment. I actually really liked Forsaken 64, despite the fact that it fell into the same pitfall as Battle Ball Brawl. It's controls were hard to grasp, and lining up your shots was a brain-numbing chore.
In conclusion, I would be a happy camper if this game were remade with a budget. The mechanic alone isn't revolutionary enough to sell a game to the AAA industry, so it would need a narrative. My suggestion would be to use the gravity-manipulation mechanic and outer-space aesthetic to create a video game adaptation of Ender's Game, or at a budget game based only around the interscholastic battles therein. What with the movie adaptation scheduled to come out in November of this year, it seems an opportune time to put this plan into action.
And so ends my spiel for today. I hope you enjoyed it.
Until next time, stay spacey.
Links
Literally Spaceballs: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=417
