Review: Spinballs
Score:
62%
This looks promising - seven spinning dials with various coloured marbles that need to be lined up so they can disappear, to be replaced by more random coloured marbles. This sounds like an arcade/puzzle game that I could get used to. Unfortunately, it's missing some mojo to lift it out of the sea of nice ideas in order to make it to gaming nirvana.
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The basic mechanic of the game works, and works well on the touch screen. You are presented with the seven dials in a hexagonal layout (with the last dial in the centre, touching all the others), and each dial has six coloured marbles. Tap on the right or left of a dial to spin it one step clockwise or anti-clockwise, and the largest colour group will be highlighted. This can be over two dials or more, as long as the colours touch along the shortest edge.
You can keep spinning to make a bigger group if you like, and when you're ready to zap the group, just touch the big glowing button at the bottom of the screen. At which point colours are zapped, and two things happen...
The first is that if the colour group touches one of the four "power-up" zones, then the power-up will be partially charged. Fill those small discs and you can activate the bonus in them whenever you feel the need - for example, if the timer is running out and you need more thinking time, and the sand-clock timer is available, then you can refill the time-bar with a single tap.
The second is a little more worrying. As with most colour/line/match games, the gaps are filled in with new colours, and the game continues. The problem is that I can't see any rhyme or reason as to how this happens. Why does a colour match on the top right dial affect the order on the bottom left dial? Without the ability to plan what's coming next, Spinballs has moved away from the puzzle axis, and towards the arcade/reaction axis.
That's not for me. I like to be able to do a bit of planning and make choices that will affect my game play - it's very easy in Spinballs to have the same number of coloured balls in a group drop, but in a different shape. What impact does this have on my next move, and which is better? I have no idea, and that really dulls the excitement of the game, and for me robs it of any addictiveness.
Before and after - can you explain where everything moved to?
There is a promising game mechanic somewhere inside Spinballs. Whirling around discs to line up colours, special bonuses, extra points for length of lines - it's a typical list of ingredients. The problem is that they've not been mixed together very well. You can derive some pleasure from the mix, but it's not the instant smash that some puzzle games have managed to achieve.
So it's nice, it works, but your mileage will vary considerably, I suspect. I'm off the fence with a thumbs up, but not by a huge margin.
-- Ewan Spence, May 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at