11 Mar The Ball: Review
The main incentive characteristic The Ball, which immediately helps to adequately evaluate her and not make a mistake in his hopes, lies in the fact that this game, despite the received commercial license, is by no means trying to look a fed and venerable project. The genre after getting rid of the label “amateur modification” has not changed. This is all the same action puzzle, which he was some time ago. In some ways innovative, somewhat exciting and forcing the gyrus (just a little), in some ways boring. And now we are all the main points suitable for these descriptions.
We play the ball!
As it turned out, compare the creation Teotl Studios With the notorious Portal – a stupid occupation. They profess almost opposite philosophy. Yes, and there and there the gameplay is completely and completely tied to the solution of puzzles with the help of improvised means and elements of the environment. Only in the experiment Valve The player felt like an experimental rat, which had to get out of the laboratory at all costs. Cubes, annoying turrets are all fleeting consumables, which you forget about almost immediately after meeting.
WITH The Ball Everything is completely different. Here the ball is not just an additional item that helps to survive in the most unforeseen situations, to solve riddles, defend yourself from the upcoming zombies, or just advance further in level. You perceive the sphere as a real partner and friend, ready to help out at any second and substitute your “shoulder” of perfect shape. Teotl Studios It really managed to convince us that the ball (in truth, his name really needs to be written only in this way, with a capital letter) – this is a kind of animated creature.
After only a few tens of minutes, you begin to treat an unusual companion with special trepidation and care. Maybe these feelings arise due to level planning. At each location, you will definitely be at least for a short time to part with a rounded companion. With a sweet heart, melted in such an ideal form, reliable, reliable and obedient. With those who always help out and protects who are the first to rush into the crowd of thirsty blood zombies, who is ready to fall out for you in a combustible mixture, then allow themselves to set fire to a nearby torch and ram the impregnable wall.
Shara in The Ball A well -deserved place of the main (after us) hero is given – the same buttons that you need to stand on are designed for him;a place in the trolley that needs to be occupied;special doorways that need to be rolled into, and much more. It will be purely psychologically difficult then (somewhere closer to the end) to perceive the “ball” only a typical means for solving your problems. This is far from the case. He is the same as the archaeologist, whom we will talk about a little later, is just in addition to iron, large and extremely silent. But the last circumstance is not at all a vice.
By the way, a special tool for controlling the ball of such emotions no longer causes. This is just a reliable tool, stored for the dog for training, a kind of “translator” of personal requests in the team understandable to your friend. And there are only two of them. The right mouse key is responsible for the attractive mode, the left – for the repulsive. On this simple, like everything brilliant, mechanics Teotl Studios managed to build a deep gameplay. Of the additional actions, an automatic “binding” of the ball to some particularly large stone block is also available: we drag the last-we free up the passage. But these are trifles. After all, the main attention is allocated only to two elementary actions.
Extreme simplicity
Fantasies to developers really do not occupy. As in the case of Portal, where the fundamental gameplay was only a portal gun shooting in entrances and outputs The Ball Everything is built on attracting and repulsing the sphere. And how much is all you can invent with this! At one point, we use the “ball” as a shield, then we give it to a torn to be torn to huge magnets, this is followed by an impromptu mini-setting “Faded monkeys run away from round and steep death”. Once you can even make a kind of volleyball “canopy”. Who played should know. This movement occurs before finishing itself, when a person in front of the net evenly throws up the ball to the beggar.
In fact, as such options for using a ball is not as much as you want. The puzzle is based on. Press the buttons on huge sizes, make the congestion for the movement of water, we knead the mummies, break the walls and floundering in the water. The surrounding environment makes diversity. Only after the passage of the good half of the plot campaign caught ourselves thinking that we did not even notice how the essence of individual puzzles was repeated many times. Because the game designers tried to glory. Judge for yourself – to watch the bubbling lava, look at the mysterious figures in strange robes, to study the marvelous walls of the dams of the Toltecs is much more interesting than to follow when we will again have to stand on the platform or push with the help of full -time weapons thick levers.
Because all this everyday small things are only a set of binding elements of the general picture of gameplay. Without such conventions in the game, in which one item is simultaneously weapons, a plug in all holes and a faithful ally, you can not do.
He is so round!
Whatever The Ball atmospheric and original action-vagar (agree, not every day you are skating an artifact on the catacombs of the Toltecs), the greatest claims we formed precisely to those factors that make it so unique. At first everything goes more or less orderly and extremely intriguing. You have not forgotten the plot to the plot from the preview? For those who have just joined us, we remind you. In the center of history – an awesome archaeologist. Once on the not -successful day of his service in the crevice of a sleeping volcano, it is in a marvelous world, the time in which seemed to stop. Well, how else to explain that everything around is filled with pyramids, churches of priests and murals of incomprehensible content?
At first, we are intrigued by small cut scenes with tales about the old days and laid down an unprecedented sacred sense of this world hidden in the vent of the volcano. Well, a little later, there are somehow very few videos, but riddles and marvelous places-more than enough. The fact that we are in ancient places indicate only the ragged walls and a bulky type of structure made of wood and stone. Developers offer to search for secrets – dubious pleasure. Some of them, however, do not come across in the hiding places, but to devote extra time to search for certain sacred clums, symbolizing unique artifacts, it is not necessarily at all.
Even greater trouble with musical accompaniment. Let’s say frankly – nothing outstanding. The necessary background, of course, creates. But it is better to turn on something drive in your favorite player, and the riddles will be easier and more funny. The atmosphere, of
course, will not affect the best way, but you will not feel lonely with the ball. So we got, perhaps, to the main minus The Ball. This game preaches hermit loneliness. Jumping macaques, a silent companion in front of the nose – this is a little wrong. Portal had at least a encouraging voice from somewhere above. Here – only a ball, consumable, which splashes blood and scravings of the flesh from the first collision, and sometimes scurrying flocks of bukashek underfoot.
We state: the “ball” turned out to be entertaining, carried away, but not enough ambitious thing. Yes, he does not have to be like that. The newly-fed-mowed genre of action-puzzles does not need large budgets and three hundred actors on voice acting. For a debut project with a difficult creative fate The Ball Just magnificent. There are a lot of interesting puzzles, a unique atmosphere and an unforgettable sense of kinship and trepidation in relation to the cold, huge, cast -iron and such perfectly round partner will warm up for a long time in our hearts.
Pros: Interesting concept;commendable design;a lot of good puzzles and the simplest combat system.
Cons: middle soundtrack;unique puzzles would like more.
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