Review: Best Ball
Score:
63%
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As regular readers may attest, I'm a sucker for Breakout-style arcade games, especially if there's shooting and other interesting action involved. Meteor proved perhaps the ultimate in the standard Breakout genre, but Best Ball adds a whole twist by requiring you to keep the ball in play through the full 360°, rather than just at the bottom of the screen. It sounds like a trivial distinction but it makes the gameplay a lot more challenging.
By the way, in case you're wondering whether you've seen this game before, Ewan's already reviewed it as PowerBall. But it's under new ownership, a new name, new pricing and new distribution. And probably an extra lick of paint into the bargain. And, most importantly, Steve 'Breakout' Litchfield had never played it before, making what's effectively its second review a good idea.
Armed with the navigator key (or, easier, '*' and '#' keys, plus '0' to fire), you find yourself constantly under pressure, racing around the circumference of the playing circle to keep the ball in play. Hitting every other block releases a green bonus sphere, each of which is clearly marked as to whether it's good or bad for you, e.g. extra points, advance to next level, larger bat, extra fireballs, and so on. The fireballs, in case you were wondering, are the things you 'fire' with the '0' key and are mainly useful for knocking out the last couple of blocks in a level when you're frustrated by batting the ball backwards and forwards between them.
And all the while a timer ticks away - the faster you complete each level, the more points get added to your score. Interest is kept up by the variety of the different levels and bonuses, with blocks that spin and slide, gun turrets that can shoot your bat smaller and nice sound effects to reinforce what you've just done.
If Best Ball sounds so far like a winner, I should balance the action described above with a big caveat. SmartphoneWare's programmers are obviously well practised at the game and have pitched it to challenge themselves, but they've left the man in the street behind. Best Ball is simply too difficult/fiddly and I found most of my games ended in frustration after a minute or so. There's no difficulty setting or a way to adjust the speed of bat movement or bat size, and this isn't helped by some suspect collision detection which sees the ball occasionally (seemingly) sailing through the edge of the bat.
Maybe I'm simply a gaming weed and you'll master Best Ball in no time. It's certainly slick and potentially enormous fun. I'm just a bit disappointed that in its current form it's not the game for me.
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at