Marble Skies

Just pick it up. If you like obstacle courses, you'll love this. If you love monkey ball, you'll love this. Perfect game to get blazed before playing. My homie loved watching me play the little bit I did before this review. Ton of fun.

This Game brings back memories of a game just like it i used to play on xbox 360

If Marble Blast Ultra was worse. As someone who easily put 500+ hours into MBU back in the day I was really looking forward to trying this game. I wouldn't pay full price for it.

I am not a fan of the physics or level design. The Roll 100km achievement was brutal and took many hours.

A good simple game. It looks nice in fullscreen, high resolution. Reminds me of the old well polished games where you could spend so many hours doing very simple tasks cause they just felt good. If you used to enjoy good old flash games and miss that quality then play this game.

+++++++++++++++++

epik game

[h1]The Dark Souls of the marbling world(?)[/h1] Marble Skies is another cog in the machine of ball rolling platformers that were made popular from classics such as Marble Madness and the timeless (and a personal favourite of mine) Marble Blast on the Xbox 360. It's your fairly standard affair which makes use of ramps, well timed jumps, speed boosts, reversing gravity, super jumps, loop de loops, and so on. Most levels require the usual, win condition of getting from A to B, but others will have you needing to collect a set number of gems scattered around the map before you can move to the goal point to win. There's also a lot of levels with a set of bonus and community maps if you want to try something a bit different, so content is plentiful. It took me just under 10 hours to 100% everything, with 2 particular Bonus levels taking up a lot of time due to their awkward nature. The soundtrack is also some rather nice ambient / electronic and fits the tone and atmosphere of the game quite well too. However it's still not quite perfect...arguably far from it. [h2]So what's wrong with it exactly?[/h2] The physics are weird, and not in a good way. Moving around is heavy and fairly unresponsive, so in order to get around you're going to need to already know precisely where you want to be in advance whilst you're on the move. This becomes problematic in the faster sections where you can't afford to give up speed because you require the it for a specific jump which makes instinctive, reactive platforming unnecessarily difficult. If you're more inclined to go slowly and methodically some sections simply just don't allow it which can be a problem when areas don't give you enough room to build up speed to traverse a section. You effectively have to chance it and hope for the best which isn't good for a game that already requires a high amount of precision. Another big gripe I have is that for some reason the developers decided to make [b]the angle which your camera is pointing influence jump angle and height. Lower angles generate more speed, higher angles give more jump height.[/b] This would be fine in itself, but it isn't ever explained anywhere aside from a couple of posts I had to go find myself in the Steam Discussions page. These pages were also from player complaints about certain levels where specific jumps were impossible because it required knowing about this feature, and even then to get it to work properly is not an easy task, nor a very consistent one either. Apparently also rolling your marble diagonally increases your speed to allow for more momentum, but again this is never explained and I had to go digging around in forums to find this out. There's no excuse to omit that information and if you're going to, then at least balance your levels around it properly or make sure it's not a feature that's an absolute necessity to get them done. It may also be a placebo effect, but I felt fairly convinced playing on mouse and keyboard was better for generating speed than it is on pad? I could very well be wrong though. The difficulty spikes are also all over the place. Some levels will have you wondering why they were even put in due to their lack of length and simplicity, whilst others require borderline autistic levels of camera angling, gravity calculation, and spin manipulation in order to get from one part to the next (and usually at mach speed where course correction is much harder due to the heavy controls). This curve isn't consistent and can very often flick between the two extremes as you progress. Couple this with the aforementioned weird camera angling tech and some levels are undoubtedly a very frustrating experience where it feels more like pot-luck that you get past them rather than through mastery of the system. Some checkpointing is also a bit hit and miss - some stages will have either very few which results in a lot of tedious trial and error or too many in between very small sections and end up being unneeded. Also, the reset button undoes any checkpoints you might have cleared, which is a small but kind of a basic oversight especially when you don't want to waste time watching yourself fall to your doom. [h2]With all this being said however, I would still recommend this game.[/h2] But why? Well, despite these issues there's still enough content here to cater to both casual and tryhard crowds. The earlier levels provide a soild enough experience in the same vein of Marble Blast without being too taxing, and the later levels will give that Souls-esque desk slamming experience with the eventual endorphin payoff when you finally conquer it. There are also global leaderboards for speedrunning levels so there's an extra element of competition available too if that floats your boat once you complete your first full playthrough. When you do get to grips with how you move around it is possible to see past the clunky feel. I would preface that this game certainly requires a level of patience and persistence to really get the most out of it however, so if you're after a more relaxed experience the later levels will more likely frustrate. If you can overcome this hurdle it does end up being an interesting challenge, even if it's one you have to do in chunks or spend ages on one level on. If the thrill of the challenge is something you look forward to in a platformer then Marble Skies could be a good choice. However, if you're looking for something more forgiving that's not going to get anywhere near as asinine mechanically or potentially rather annoying in consistency I would move towards getting Marble It Up Ultra instead.

💋

"The physics" Greatest game ever.