Publisher: Tripware Interactive
Developer: Teotl Studios
Steam – $19.99
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“The Ball is a first person action-adventure game featuring a full single-player experience built on Epic’s Unreal™ Engine 3 technology. As a swashbuckling archaeologist working on the slopes of a dormant volcano somewhere in Mexico, you get stuck in a cavern. It doesn’t take long before you realize this is more than just a cave. You reveal ancient ruins that have been hidden from outsiders for centuries and discover a mysterious artifact, a gold and metal shelled Ball. As you progress towards solving the mystery of this amazing place you must unlock the secrets of The Ball and learn to control this ancient artifact. You will also start to encounter not just puzzles and traps, but also various strange creatures – the guardians of this mystery. These creatures also have to be overcome, using only The Ball to defend you. Venturing deeper into the volcano, you reveal some of mankind’s greatest secrets.”
Storyline/Setting: You are a archaeologist with no actual name we could see or hear, so we will name him Dr. Jones. You fall into a chasm and discover that there is more down there then just gravel and darkness, as for the Mexican community having all the fun places to explore your slap dab in the center of Zombies, and puzzles and traps that try to stop your progress. The storyline itself it was not truly apparent but like portal if you got plenty to explore and solve, who needs a full on storyline if your too busy rolling a Large ball on some monkeys. Now with all this said and mentioned Though the storyline was faint the setting which is filled with dark and very open temple like textures, we were amazed by the attention to detail that the unreal 3 engine and this new company pushed out to us. Pardon the Pun.
Game play: Grasping for a loose comparison of this game is quite easy to uphold, think Indiana Jones discovered a copy of Portal, studied it, and altered the idea and made it into a sort of first person Marble madness puzzle game, with Action adventure elements and you should not be wrong in the slightest. Everything from the monsters to the puzzle solving is Ace, really Ace work. Combining Running action to careful movement, the ball interacts with the world from switches to crushing large and small enemies was a true treat to watch and hear the crunching of bones and flesh. While you would expect the game to feel linear after a few puzzles you would be wrong by then you are experiencing monsters that step in your path giving it more of a challenge then most puzzle titles to date that we could think of. The game play was stylish and cases alot of changes of pants when the larger challenges were afoot.And the Giant Undead gorilla that arose from New yorks ground after a fall. the game play Was truly a great experience and we hope to see more of this style.
Music/Sound: The soundtrack was decent at most, not lackluster but giving you the feeling for the area you roam around in. In most areas you feel like you heard the tracks before looping. But again it was only measured in small doses and the game play over bleeds this game.
Overall Score: 8.7 A Flat-out Solid FPS adventure game that gives you a great challenging experience, as well as let you be creative and browse your locations rather then be linear in most respects.
