Go Mecha Ball Review (musashi)
I’ll be bold and give the first negative review. This doesn’t mean I think the game is bad; it’s a pity steam doesn’t give the ability to give a mixed review.
***Please note that the "negatives" below aren't necessarily bad for everyone. This review is aimed to explain what type of game to expect.
Positives:
✅great aesthetics (art animation music etc)
✅game concept of morph ball + twin stick is very good and just feels like a logical and effective combo
✅tight gameplay design that is simple to understand and is easy to get into. Also avoids getting overly messy and chaotic as many roguelikes can
✅overall sense of talent, love and polish emanates from the game and devs
Negatives (I will use more words to explain each point)
💔Execution of certain design elements is questionable as of day 1. using halfpipes on enemies is too effective and easily undermines the twin stick shooting aspect. You can keep going on halfpipes to land on enemies to easily sidestep most of the strategy and skill of the game, and the game even rewards such an exploit by your kill chain freezing while in the air and also resetting the chain timer when landing on enemies, even if you didn’t kill them. You can breeze through harder difficulties this way as well, especially with certain abilities like temporary shield.
💔related to above point, the game overall rewards staying in ball too much. Harder difficulties introduce enemies that must be jumped on or collided for all enemy variations. Combine this with the fact that staying in ball is safer and is better for moving around the map, and much easier to maintain kill chain, and the game doesn’t really incentivize in any way to ever actually get out of ball and play the game as a twin stick shooter. It seems the ball mechanic should enhance the twin stick experience, and it does on first impressions, until you start to understand how powerful and safe stuff like spamming jump kills is…and then it feels like the ball system does more to undermine the twin stick experience than enhance it. A player must make a conscious choice to play against what the systems incentivize you to do in order to enjoy the twin stick experience and I think that’s a significant flaw.
💔barebones content. I believe there are 4 worlds and 4 bosses. The worlds introduce some new mechanics but don’t expect breadth and variety. The levels are the exact same layout every run. Almost no dialogue or lore. 4 difficulty levels of the same 4 worlds and that’s the end.
💔 guns feel samey. There’s a decent amount of guns, but somehow they end up feeling all functionally similar. Probably partially because functionally they ARE similar in that generally to kill an enemy, a player first ball-boosts into an enemy (this is how you get more ammo), then shoots them as in a shoot-punch/shotgun-melee combo in Halo. Basically the game incentivizes shooting from point-blank range. You can begin to understand how this can quickly undermine the feel of guns being functionally different even if they would be at a distance.
💔not particularly captivating for more hardcore arcade shooter nor roguelike fans. This is not really the type of roguelike experience that begets a player to sink hundreds of hours clearing additional difficulty modifiers, studying its depth, experimenting etc. it’s also not an arcade experience that will require dozens of hours to get the hardest difficulty clear. It’s more a light, casual experience that will probably take a more seasoned gamer anywhere from a few hours to a casual weekend grind to clear the hardest difficulty and then move onto something else.
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Overall my feelings on the game are mixed. It no doubt has a lot of love and care that’s obvious when you play it. There’s a solid foundation and some great ideas. It’s currently a quite barebones experience that I personally believe will cater more to a casual audience than hardcore twin stick and roguelike players. Casual gamers will love the kinetic feel, lighter difficulty, charming and satisfying vibe, and leniency of mechanics such as the very easy kill chain. More seasoned gamers with an eye for things like exploits and balancing of mechanics and such may harbor more critical thoughts about the game.