Super Ball Escape Review

By , on March 10, 2011


Super Ball Escape
Download on the AppStore
3 out of 5

PROS

  • Precise tilt controls; once calibrated you can almost spin on a dime.
  • Huge maze-like levels; 12 story missions to complete.
  • Clever power-up concepts; hide in plain sight or try something with more of a punch.

CONS

  • Repetitive gameplay and visuals; collecting power-ups feels like an unnecessary time-sink and the visuals get tiring very quickly.
  • Extremely low sound quality; sound artifacts pop and burble, ruining the atmospheric audio.
  • No alternative controls.

VERDICT

You won't need to stretch your mind too far to overcome the challenges in Super Ball Escape, but the combination of finely-balancing yourself on thin platforms, avoiding enemies and solving basic puzzles does a good job of filling this gap.


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Super Ball Escape by Playlithium may look like a fairly prototypical Labyrinth-inspired tilt-based game and you'd be right, well at least for the first few minutes of the game, but it doesn't take long before you're morphing and trying to trick your way past defenses to escape the crazy maze you're stuck in.

But first things first - at what point in the future did humanity decide to design their buildings out of corridors and thin platforms that drop off in to a near-bottomless void? Shouldn't someone call a Health and Safety representative to sort this out? At any rate, the AI-spheroid you control is stuck trying to escape after the scientist who created it was told to remove its emotions (you know, because the evil corporation said so).

No other options for controlling the sphere are available besides the default tilt controls, however after calibration the responsiveness is accurate enough to make traversing even tiny platforms relatively simple. That isn't to say you aren't going to die though, especially given the extreme size of each of the game's 12 story levels where patrolling robots, security cameras and the ever-present pit of death will conspire against you at every turn.

Unfortunately Super Ball Escape is prone to feeling repetitive as power-ups earned by upgrading your sphere are lost at the start of each new level and need to be repurchased to continue. While this does encourage customization of your sphere to tackle the challenges however you want, it also means you're forced to repeat the time-sink of searching for upgrade-bots. Ultimately it's a time-wasting chore that could have otherwise been spent on dealing with smarter robot opponents or other potential puzzles.

Given the size of each level you'll be kept busy for a long time trying to survive in Super Ball Escape and if you enjoy Labyrinth-style games you'll definitely get a kick out of this casual title.

Screenshots

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