Review: Go Mecha Ball

I love a good twin stick shooter, the simplicity of the action coupled with sometimes over the top crazy weapons is usually enough to keep me entertained for hundreds of hours. However Go Mecha Ball is a bit of a rarity to me. Let me explain… Now normally I will go into a twin stick shooter with rogue-like progression with a sense of knowing that it will take me dozens of tries to get anywhere significant. This is usually helped by interesting enemies, new mechanics and a lot of trial and error. Go Mecha Ball tries to bring something like that to the table but it just doesn’t work. Now I don’t hate the game, far from it, but I don’t feel compelled to have that ‘one more run’ that other games manage to pull out of me during the late hours. There are certain rogue-like elements to the game such as collecting cash to pay for upgrades and new weapons, and yes the levels do change every play through…but not enough, the enemies are all the same, the bosses are always in the same places and always the same ones each and every time you play through.

Things I liked!

• The gameplay for the most part | Go Mecha Ball does have fun mechanics, I will give it that. The fact you can choose to play it as a simple twin stick shooter style game or transform into a ball and roll around like you are in a pinball machine… except it’s more like Marble Madness than pinball… (look it    up, it was an awesome wee game) anyway… the gameplay    is actually easy to pick up and when you get the hang of the physics you will find yourself zooming around each arena and destroying your enemies with abandon.

Neither good nor bad

• The weapons | The weapons are pretty decent and there are a lot of varied skins for them, but other than giving them funny names and skins…they are pretty much just standard guns. They do the job they are meant to do, the destroy they enemies and give you something to collect while you play.
  
  
• The graphics | Graphically there is a lot going on in the game but once you have seen the monsters and layouts of each level it all kind of blurs together, you stop appreciating the art style and concentrate more on the gameplay. Is that a bad thing? I’m not sure…
  
  
• Sound design | The sound design of the game itself is pretty decent, there is something to be said about a satisfying explosion or two while you blast a robot with a gun shaped like a duck. But there is a gimmick in this game that I honestly didn’t really get a chance to notice very much, and that is the changing soundscape depending on how you play. There is just so much going on it is a cacophony of noise and I couldn’t tell what was music and what was random noise.

Things I disliked!

• The story | I honestly couldn’t tell you what the background story for the game is, I know there is one because I had to sit through the unskippable cutscene when the game loaded up for the first time, but it just leaked straight out of my head after a few playthroughs. Now sometimes games don’t need a story and that is fine, but if you are going to have one then make sure it is compelling and interesting.
  
  
• The lack of originality | Yes Go Mecha Ball is a new game, but in an a lot of ways it feels like it is a by the book twin stick, no real innovation even with the ‘new mechanics’ it tries to bring in, it just doesn’t feel like something I would want to spend hours and hours playing. I felt that once I had completed it a couple of times I was just rapidly losing interest. The enemies were all predictable, the bosses even more so and it really didn’t matter what weapons you used as they all had a very similar rate of damage. So yes while the game is fun to play a few times, it pales in comparison to already established twin stick games out there.