Aiball is, well, don't get fooled by the cute looking screen shots. Aiball is an essay on unethical behaviour from shady Russian developers. This is an abandoned Early Access nightmare, it was intended to be a low poly physics/ragdoll brawler, as you can see from the cute, claymation looking low poly figures, but those models are basically all the game has. There's no multiplayer, you can spawn other "players" but with no online modes or anything, it's just you running around.. it's stupid. There's a football mode that didn't even have a football spawn in it. This is pure garbage, and the developer has positioned this deliberately and misleadingly to try scam gamers into buying a knowingly faulty, broken and incomplete product.
The game was abandoned roughly 3 years after launch and hasn't been updated in about 3 years. It blew past the developers 1 year commitment to complete the game without any notification or admission of failure from the developer. The game will never be completed, but the developer not only keeps this on Steam in a broken and incomplete state, but periodically puts the game on sale to try scam more gamers into buying it!!! That's incredibly unethical, shady behaviour, but there's more. Of course there's more.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the 1990s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.
Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the music using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only appears around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game (somewhat recently)... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it (this is no surprise given the abandoned, broken, unplayable nature of the game). We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
Furthering the unethical nature of this developer, while they are selling this incomplete game under Valve's failed Early Access program, they're abusing that program, and not working on this game full time, as they have other projects in the works. That means there's ZERO confidence anyone who buys this in Early Access will receive a complete game, lending further credibility to the conjecture that they're being scammed.
[b][quote][url=https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2017/01/18/steam-takes-down-art-of-stealth-after-developer-posts-fake-reviews/?sh=750e13e12354]Warning: Review Manipulation![/url][/quote][/b]This game features a number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in Russian, appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game, and the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this game should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.
Aiball is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend.
