Review: Silver Ball
Score:
69%
Silver Ball, from Mmmooo, is an engaging Java puzzle game, that's going to need some arcade like reactions as you progress through the title.
Version Reviewed: 1.00
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There are some games that are incredibly
original, and there are some that take the classics and re-work them.
Silver Ball is the latter. It's a tile based ‘maze' game, where you have to
navigate your 'Silver Ball' through each level to get to the exit. In your way
are a number of hazards, from fixed points of death, to marauding moving balls
of fire - and of course the environment.
As with most of these games, the challenge
is in where you can travel in a level. Water is off limits, you'll need to push
blocks into the water to make bridges; ice cubes which slide until they crash
into water (so you have to aim them correctly if you're going to use them for
bridge building); and switches around the level that need to be activated by
balancing blocks on them... All good clean traditional fun.
One of the problem with doing a game that's
been seen many times before is that you're going to be compared to all of them,
and slight flaws in game play are going to be magnified. Nothing in Silver Ball
is a showstopper, but I'd hope a second release can put a little more polish on
a few things. While the enemy balls on the level move with impeccable
smoothness, the Silver Ball has a certain stop start nature that takes some
getting used to. And when you die, the fade to black on the screen takes a long
time - long enough for me to wonder if there is a ‘skip' button.
Then there's the sound. It's functional at
best, with a number of fanfares as you open the game, lose your lives, or
complete a level. The problem is the volume. It's amazingly loud on my N95, to
the point that even on a busy bus, everyone will know when you finish a level.
So naturally you're going to turn it down - except it's binary. Either off or
on. Okay, off it is.
Except it doesn't save this setting - you
need to switch it off every time you open the game - and you can't do that
until after the opening fanfare sounds.
This is disappointing, as the rest of
Silver Ball seems to have taken the idea of mobile game play into the design
process. All the levels are restricted to one screen - there's no large scale
scrolling, it's all on display so you can work it out there and then. Each
level is short, at most two minutes, and the time limit for each level is tight
but realistic. The early levels are only about 30 seconds.
It also automatically saves your progress,
so even though you may have lost all your lives, you can ‘Load Game' instead of
‘New Game' and be taken to the first level you have not yet completed. This is
good, because while some people will go all out for a top score, I think the majority
of people will just want to work through and complete all the levels.
For just under 6 Euros, Silver Ball pretty
much hits the mark - the puzzles are not frustrating in the extreme, it's well
suited to the mobile environment, and the small niggles are easy to live with.
-- Ewan Spence, March 2008
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at