izigame.me

This is a very good game! It feels really good to play and there’s lots of depth to the movement and the levels.

It’s quite different from other platformers due to the marble physics, and it’s fun to slowly learn to manage your speed and turning radius and such. When you go really fast, it can be quite exhilarating, and you rarely go slow.
Some people have unfavorably compared this game to previous Marble Blast games for having excised the study of spin and recoil, but I beg to differ—the marble’s jumps and bounces are quite interesting and being able to handle them helps a lot.
I also really like how physically realistic the game feels, even the gravity changing surfaces feel "correct", and the fact that moving platforms have realistic momentum (i.e. you bounce slightly when the platform moves suddenly, or you can get lots of speed when you jump off a moving platform) is really nice.

The campaign is long enough and there’s plenty of bonus levels, though for some levels getting the gold time, which you need to unlock bonus levels, can be quite annoying (but not frustrating).
Barely any levels feel tedious. I’ve seen a few levels I decided to skip for the moment because I felt I wasn’t in the mood for that style of gameplay, but I returned later and had fun anyways, so that only means there’s variety in the style of levels. They’re very creatively designed and often have nice unique ideas.
The secret hidden collectibles are cool. I haven’t gotten most of them, though. But I think it’s a bid debatably reasonable that they pause gameplay when you get them. At least you keep them even if you restart the level without finishing it.

The levels are gorgeously rendered and have a very cohesive structure and art style. I think the fact that a lot of surfaces are beveled adds a lot to the style. The game performs well on my machine and feels very responsive.
The signs and other visual decorations also look really nice and make the levels interesting to look at. It’s practically never unclear what you should do because of bad level layout.
It’s also nice that the design system appears to be good enough that custom levels can be both varied and expressive, and feel right at home with the official levels.

I have had issues with the controller input initially, but I can’t tell if that’s because of something wrong with the game or if it’s just my controller not being accounted for, I think the Steam Controller can be considered fairly niche. Specifically, I would recommend rebinding the actions on the d-pad to other buttons because they sometimes overlap, and it’s annoying how the joystick isn’t interpreted as a d-pad properly in menus.
It took some getting used to the camera controls after having played the Marble It Up Classic version, but it’s fine!
One thing I really disliked was the lack of a way to quickly go back to a previous checkpoint. The death animation is somewhat long and the (tempting to press) restart button ignores checkpoints.

One thing I don’t enjoy at all is the shards system, where you pointlessly get shards per level completion, high score, and apparently a bonus per level per day, to spend on cosmetics. It feels very iffy as it reminds me of predatory gimmicks with daily bonuses in free-to-play games. But it’s easy to ignore and I haven’t had to grind for anything, as you get shards in large enough quantities. (And there are no microtransactions.)

I have played only one round of multiplayer and I had a bad experience, everyone was glitching out. But I can’t tell if that’s the game, my internet connection, or their internet connection (I’m fairly sure it’s not my internet connection).

Highly recommended if you like platforming or are curious about rolling a marble around!