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GloBallPosted in Arcade on 08 Jun 2009 |
 Reviewed by Steve Litchfield |
   (24 votes, average: 3.50 out of 5)  Loading ... |
Editor’s rating: 
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What do you get when you combine Breakout, Pac-Man, Pinball and Duke Nukem and then truss them all up in graphics that Industrial Light and Magic would have been proud of? You get GloBall, of course, and a very fine iPhone game it is too. Combining elements from other classic games and then adding a huge twist to the whole concept of a global high score table, GloBall deserves the success it has been getting recently.
In short, you control a ball using the iPhone’s (or iPod Touch’s) accelerometer, aiming to use gravity to smash the ball into every block on each level. Sound simple enough? Well, add in increasingly tortuous levels, armed with rotating spikes, laser beams (as seen in Duke Nukem), powered buffers (as in Pinball) and enemy bugs (which can often be turned into eatable bonuses – hence the Pac-Man reference), add in time pressure (you get bonus points for time not used to clear a level) and add in a multitude of ‘Bonus’ blocks, and you end up with something that’s moderately exciting in terms of sheer gameplay.
There’s also, if I may say, so, a certain satisfaction in clearing blocks, especially when the blocks explode in various animated ways and when your own ball picks up powerups that give you extra blastability. As you make your way through the (currently) 43 levels, your one worry should be that GloBall is simply too easy – after all, you’ll progress through the entire game without hitting any showstopping levels and will finish after a couple of hours, wondering why everyone else is raving about it.
What you’ve missed is the novel high score system. The developers maintain a server (currently somewhat overwhelmed, but they’re “working on it”) that records the best scores for each player for each level – and also where in the world they are. The upshot of this is that you can browse the levels, seeing your world rank at each. So, for example, you might be 34th in the world on level 15 and GloBall will cheerfully inform you that you’re the best at that level for 60,000 feet! One point of eye candy is that the globe backdrop is zoomable in the same way as Google Maps, i.e. you can pinch and splay it, to view where other players are in the world. Cool, but not really needed, of course.
You see, every level has enough bonus blocks and twists and turns that you’ll nearly always be able to find a better way to play it, to build your score faster and complete the destruction quicker. And, in the process, increase your world rank for each level. Attempt each level 10 times and that’s roughly twelve hours of gameplay – at which point you’ll feel a lot happier about GloBall’s value for money.
Ultimately, 43 levels aren’t enough, of course, but I’m confident that, in addition to upgrading their servers, GloBall’s developers are also beavering away on new levels, new enemies and new surprises!
