With game development getting more convoluted than ever, the idea of releasing a product early in beta and slowly adding stuff to it over the course of the development cycle is quite an interesting proposal. For some more positive examples, it can help developers get more direct feedback from the players while also funding their game, like how Hades handled it. On the other hand, with money being given to them for less work, they may decide to just run off with the cash and leave a finished product, like how Multiversus fumbled the bag. For what it’s worth, Virballs is a finished game with a clear ending; it’s just a finished game that’s not good.
During a police chase in space, Dr. Corvid is being hunted down after his love for mayhem created his newest plan against the galaxy. This plan involves sending his newest army called Virballs, a species of balls that are infused with the elements around the galaxy. With all the planets being messed up, it’s up to ORB, aka the Object Removal Bot, to go from planet to planet to destroy and free them from these Virballs, by using them against each other.
In terms of presentation, it doesn’t start on a good foot, either in terms of graphics, or audio. The game looks like a cheap fake game you would see in a movie. All the different Virballs have their own unique designs, showing off all the different abilities they can give you, but the fact they’re all spherical and surrounded by a world that feels so jagged around the edges and so generic makes them feel so lifeless. I have seen a couple of graphical objects that aren’t connected that really should. Meanwhile, the audio is just as stock and cookie-cutter. From the stage music being forgettable and the sounds of the shots being fired and hit, it just never clicked.
The objective of the game is simple; as ORB, you travel around stage after stage fighting off the Virballs while trying to clear a main objective. These goals can be either destroying all the enemy containers and then a boss, killing a certain number of enemies of a specific type, or guiding a group of aliens to a rocket ship. At the start, your ORB is just a sentient suit. However, soon enough you get access to the Earth core, letting it be a part of your suit. With this new core, you can absorb Virballs to turn them into a weapon against the other Virballs and enemies. Each new world gives you a new core to play with, giving you more combos and ways to attack your foes.
Let’s start with what the game does a good job at. There are a ton of different weapon possibilities here. Each type of variant gives your character a Virball that represents the power being used. Some weapons can shoot out lightning or charge for a lightning blast, others will shoot out balls of lightning that deal damage to everyone within an area, and other weapons will utilize snow to freeze opponents, wind to attack everything in front of you, and so on. There’s always going to be some new weapon to try out in each world and to see how they work.
The other good part of the game is the turbo mode. As a giant walking core, you move slowly by walking forward and adjusting the camera to always be behind you. There are left and right button keys, but they’re more like strafing than actual turns. It’s a modified version of tank controls, and it takes a while to get used to. However, to get around faster, you can retract to your ball form and roll around, which is way more fun than the standard way of movement. The momentum feels fair while giving you a chance to pick up speed. Add in the fact you can jump a bit in this form, and it makes me wish they just spent their time making a marble racing game or something like Super Monkey Ball instead of focusing on the combat.
Yeah, time for the negatives, which is more or less the rest of the game. Despite all the unique weapons here, combat is the definition of mindless. The Virballs can all be taken down just by aiming your gun at them, firing, and waiting for them to go. For common enemies, there’s no strategy. You do have ammo for your Virball weapons but given how refilling your ammo is as simple as absorbing the smaller Virballs and essentially eating them, you’re never going to be running low on ammo of any kind, especially when you can switch between all the weapons. All this means you’re never going to have to worry about ammo, so if you’re looking for something a bit more thoughtful than just shooting without any of the excessive violence that makes games like Ultrakill or Doom enjoyable, then you’re just not going to find that here.
There are three types of levels. The worst types are escort levels where you have to guide some aliens called Floobers to the rocket ship on the stage. They don’t affect gameplay in any way, like having health bars to protect, you just have to touch them, and they’ll follow you to the end, that is, unless they decide to get stuck between a bunch of grass and force you to restart the stage. They quickly wore out their welcome for me in their first stage, so seeing that they’re on each planet doesn’t excite me to put it nicely. That wasn’t the only time I got soft-locked either, with some bosses or enemies just not loading in properly requiring me to reboot the stage to try again.
The stages that focus on combat are more stable but get boring very fast. Some stages have you going after a certain enemy type, where after beating a handful of them the game declares it to be good enough and moves on. It reeks of padding a game out with no content, which is most evident in the bosses, save for the last boss of each world which tries to do something new, even if it just boils down to you waiting for their attack to be done to attack them.
The stages with boss fights are simple enough to get through; just beat the containers that keep respawning enemies before heading to the boss of the area. At first, the giant tube-like boss is interesting, but with each world and level having the type of boss at the end of it, the game starts to reveal its worst trait, copying and pasting everything.
Within the first three levels, you’ll begin to see sections of the previous levels brought back to be stapled together to create a new experience. This isn’t like the Katamari games where the goal is to go from one level where you’re stuck hanging around with frogs to coming back to be able to roll up fully grown humans to give the game a growing sense of scope, it comes off at the developer making level sections than just copying and placing sections in each new level of the world in different ways and passing it off as a new level. It somehow manages to come off as the level is randomly generated like in Super Meat Boy Forever despite not being randomly generated, feeling cheap, especially when you go to another world and see that the same sections can repeat across the entire game. I will say, there are more new sections as you move on, but each world will still have its repeating sections, making the game feel like it was just a school project put together the day before it was due.
Overall, Virballs turned out to be quite a disappointing game. The ball mode physics was cool to utilize, and the different weapons on display can be interesting to discover, but aside from that, there’s little reason to come back. While the multiple weapons are cool to see, there’s little reason to prioritize one over another when there is no point to them for any combat or puzzle elements. The combat is pointless and mind-numbing, the bosses are either boring and repetitive or tedious and unnecessarily dragged out. The level design feels completely underbaked and with it being copy-pasted, it drains any desire to see any further levels. If the developer decided to create a ball-rolling game with this game’s physics, then I could see myself checking that new game out, but as it is now, this game just has nothing going for it.
