Droppin’ Ballz

Droppin’ Ballz is one of those “fall as far as you can” games.  My gut tells me it was designed with tilt-controls in mind.  Because Microsoft opted to not go with a motion-controller like everyone and their mom and instead decided to create a device that plays like Minority Report as invented by the chronically unambitious, Ballz is stuck using the trigger buttons instead.  I guess this control scheme works, but it never feels quite right.   My biggest complaint, that the game moves too slowly, is easily corrected by adjusting the difficulty.  The game is set to easy on default, but it’s only really tolerable on normal or higher.  And that’s assuming you play the game on its classic mode, where you just fall from one platform to another.  I was ready to write off Droppin’ Ballz as just another phone-style faller that has no place on a console.

I think the developers were droppin’ something, but it wasn’t ballz.

And then I tried Fever mode, which feels like you’re falling through the rabbit hole from Alice in Wonderland, only without having to drop acid.  Actually, I imagine if you dropped acid while playing this, it would be pretty fucking bad ass, but probably a little too difficult to play.  The idea is still  the same: fall from platform to platform, try to not miss the platforms, and try not to land on the black platforms.  Only in this mode, the background changes color and tries to distract you, plus there are perspective-altering “power-ups” that shift what angle you view the game from.  This is what the whole game should have been like.  It’s as if developers flipped a coin to decide if they would go the generic route or the trippin’ on mushrooms route, and the coin fell down a sewer grate.  And they couldn’t flip another because then they wouldn’t have enough change left to get a Mountain Dew, so they said “fuck it” and continued working on the inferior classic mode as well.

I actually did like Droppin’ Ballz, but I have a tough time recommending it.  There’s no online leaderboards, so there’s really no point in playing it.  Hell, even the local leaderboards are all kinds of fucked up.  In theory, there should be six boards: one for each game mode on each difficulty level.  The point values increase on the higher difficulty stages, so ranking a game played on the tedious easy mode over the medium mode is silly.  But that’s how it’s done in Droppin’ Ballz.  Even worse, it ranks games played in Classic mode against games played in the wacky Fever mode, which makes no sense at all.  I guess Fever Mode is good for a twenty-minute distraction and priced accordingly, so I do mildly recommend it.  I would rather see this game on iPhone, with online leaderboards.  I could see it being a big, word-of-mouth hit on there.  It would be a perfect fit on a platform developed by an acid-dropping, corporate hippie.  They could rename it “Jobs Ball.”

Droppin’ Ballz was developed by He-3 Software

80 Microsoft Points heard Hurley gave his hopes up when he heard that there was a way to make your balls drop for just 80MSP in the making of this review.

Gameplay footage courtesy of Aaron the Splazer