Paperball

Considering that I was initially going to purchase Rolled Out, an indie very similar to the focus of this review here, what made me take the leap over to Paperball and is it a better game as far as what it sets out to do in terms of simple yet fun and addictive gameplay? Before getting ahead of ourselves, first it's always best to begin at the basics which, in this game, is what the game is actually all about. Since it's quite clear that Paperball takes heavy inspiration from one of gaming's beloved classics (though a series that is sadly being forgotten about due to recent mediocre titles becoming the norm) that is the Super Monkey Ball series, the aim of this charming indie is to guide your paper ball from the starting point to the goal by means of not necessarily directly moving said ball but rather the very platforms themselves! (although I'd hardly blame you if you felt otherwise, certainly it doesn't feel like it with how smooth the controls are!) One thing I will get right off the bat is what makes this different from the Super Monkey Ball games, particularly SMB1 and SMB2 that are highly-praised by many casual and expert gamers alike? Seeing as the ball you are controlling isn't one made out of a plastic-like substance but rather made from more softer paper material, this results in your bounces not being nearly as considerable as it would be in the SMB games, meaning this lends itself to more casual play where making big leaps isn't nearly as scary as it would be. It also helps that the levels are designed around this too, hence the gameplay complimenting the physics changes, which I appreciate given how risky it is to stray from what works too much without alienating potential fans! On the note of the difficulty of Paperball, seeing as the game's Steam description makes it a point to highlight the more casual direction as far as general gameplay goes, I can thankfully say that there is other changes that help to ease newer players into the fun ball platforming mechanics as time limits and limited lives are no longer a thing here as well as allowing players to skip a level after failing so many times. (This varies from one level to the next depending on difficulty, seems to average at around 20 deaths) Alongside the aforementioned physics changes, it's easy to see why Paperball is more accommodating towards casual gamers! Although this raises a good question within itself, since making the gameplay aspect of one's own game too easy can often result in little to no challenge being offered due to practically no push to encourage the player to get better over time. If Paperball is doing all that it can to make the casual gameplay experience better, then what incentives are there for veterans of the genre/SMB series or even those who like a good challenge? Well alongside the usual Steam achievements to give players that desire to become better at the game, there exists four tiers of medals that show just how good you are at the game, ranging from bronze being a low-tier of entry (basically doing just alright at it, as it is possible to pass a level without any medal!) all the way to an extremely demanding and near-frame perfect 'platinum' medal that exists largely for the experts to pursue! Coupled with the medals system is the incentive to not die nearly as much since this game hosts five different difficulties (from easiest to hardest: Novice, Intermediate, Expert, Sunflower & Champion) that each increase in difficulty and vary in length from one to the next, however they also each have their own extra levels known as 'encores'. These extra-challenging levels are all locked behind beating the difficulty chosen with only so many deaths as, this way, players are encouraged to learn the levels better (something made all the more easier with infinite lives!) so that they can then proceed to the actual hard content that this game offers as it should be noted that both Expert and Champion are also locked behind the completion of Intermediate and Expert respectively. Add in various other game modes alongside the typical Arcade Mode that acts as the traditional 'Super Monkey Ball' experience (Medal Mode is closer to SMB2's story mode where you choose which level to play in the first world and need to beat them all at a certain tier of medal to proceed which goes higher the further you progress, Rush Mode acts as a 'time-trial' of sorts that has a time limit where higher tier medals give you additional time to beat further levels, Mad Shuffle lets you customize a random selection of all 230 stages that you can pick and choose with limited lives to beat as many as you can, Blitz Mode allows you to jump like you can in more modern SMB games, Multiplayer Mode pits you against a friend in local two-player competitive action as you aim to rack up as many stars as possible between the two and Flip Mode having two players quickly exchange control of the one ball for the duration of the game) and you can easily see how there's plenty on offer for fans of such a classic gem! Though to point out a few flaws within Paperball, first (and perhaps most pressing) is within this game's very own 'cheat' of sorts, by which I mean it's not so much down to how easily accessible it is nor due to being hidden behind a paywall since (spoilers for the rest of this section) [spoiler]it is something that the player must earn as it requires completion of Champion's encore levels, meaning they must master the 10 very hard levels and not die more than 15 times in a single run to even access these final few elite levels! However my main issue stems from how the cheat itself is implemented, seeing as zero gravity (arguably more like 'moon gravity' since there is still a weak gravitational pull downwards) can easily break the vast majority of this game's levels and make getting Platinum medals a walk in the park for most. The problem that then naturally comes from this is that, due to not treating this as a fun gimmick that disables any progress on the side, using zero gravity once you have beaten the Champion Encore levels means you can essentially 'cheese' any and all difficulties and their encore levels alongside all of the Medal Mode's worlds for ridiculously easy platinum medals which, as a result, grants a much easier time of completing this game's hardest achievements. (Thankfully the global leaderboards do not register runs that have used zero gravity even once, albeit I wouldn't have minded an alternate leaderboard for usage of zero gravity instead)[/spoiler] Other issues include the pricing of the DLC (each pack comes with 10 regular + 5 encore levels plus a new world theme and a shared 'encore' theme between the three) as £0.89 doesn't sound like much for 15 levels until you compare it to the price of the game itself and how it offers a much bigger selection of 185 stages for just £5.89 which, when coupled with some achievements being locked behind said DLC, I would advise you buy if you are looking to support the indie studio rather than expecting a full 'expansion' of sorts. Also the lack of a 'story' that could have easily accompanied the Medal Mode for Paperball is a missed opportunity, as I quite liked the comic style cutscene seen upon booting the game up and it would have added extra charm to the secondary game mode on top of expanding this game's characters, even if it is not the main focus for this indie here. In conclusion, Paperball is definitely a competent and fairly fleshed-out platformer that takes full advantage of it's gameplay that takes inspiration from the Super Monkey Ball whilst also daring to change the formula ever-so-much by adapting a 'paper-esque' physics to have it make sense alongside adding to the more casual-friendly experience whilst dangling some tempting 'carrots' for more experienced gamers and it's safe to say that you'll have a great time regardless of how much you have played of the SMB classics!

What could've been a competent Monkey Ball clone with a cute art style and catchy stage tunes suffers from some terrible design decisions and a major design flaw -- additive diagonal movement speed (the sort of thing you'd expect from an old FPS game, not a physics-based precision-platformer). What this means is that if you simultaneously hold both forward and left or right (and moreso if you turn the camera sideways), you will move faster than if you held just forward by itself. This quirk has caused me to over-correct my movement and fall off the courses far too many times. Now, I consider myself a Monkey Ball expert (I've 100% cleared Banana Mania for instance), but some of the levels in this game feel like you can only clear them if you're lucky, not if you're skilled. Dishonourable mentions go to Gables (a level designed around climbing and descending steep slopes), Razor Blades (traversing gradually thinner and steeper jagged platform rings where you'll likely bump and fall off), and Serial Jumps (a downhill ramp where you can and will bounce over the jumps through no fault of your own due to the game's physics). Oh yeah, and if you want to play the game's "Encore" stages, you need to go through an entire set without failing too many times, and those three stages I mentioned are all in the same "Expert" category. Good thing there's an exploit to bypass that requirement, or else I would've never seen said stages (and this is coming from someone who completed Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania's marathon mode while losing less than 100 lives!). And then there's the torture that is getting "Platinum" times in Medal Mode (a mode dedicated around speedrunning the individual stages which has most of the game's achievements). So you know that diagonal movement flaw I mentioned? That is MANDATORY for most of them, and the times seem to be set with that in mind. If the required times for those were even just a quarter-second longer, that would alleviate most of my frustrations, but the way they're implemented practically requires TAS-level frame-perfect precision to obtain. I hope you enjoy constantly pause-buffering! The worst offenders were 5-2 Swinging Platforms, 7-3 Rooftop Ramps, 10-8 Vanishing Road, 11-2 Variable Size, and B-4 Double Loop, which all took me hours and hundreds of attempts before succeeding, with most of the other stages in the same tiers taking roughly a tenth of the time in comparison. And no, the reward you get for completing the game's hardest stages (Champion Encore) won't even help you get a good chunk of those. And finally there's another elephant in the room for completionists, the "Fallout Royale" achievement. If there was ever something in a game that was such a blatant disrespect of the player's time, it'd be that achievement for... resetting a level 76,000 times. For the record, once I finally achieved every last Platinum Medal in the game, my total reset count was 7,011, which wasn't even enough for the preceding achievement which required 10,000 resets! Cue me setting up a macro to constantly restart for the next TWENTY HOURS (2/5ths of my total playtime!). I don't know who thought this was a good idea, those should've been a tenth of the required amounts for them to actually be achievable naturally. I'd be bored out of my mind if I wasn't watching livestreams the entire time... Now, I get it. Making games is hard, especially if you're a small team of less than 10 people like with Paperball here. But some of these issues could have easily been avoided if the developers showed some restraint. For that, this game gets a B-. See me after class, Coco.

Exponentially better current-day Monkey Ball than any of the current Monkey Balls from Sega. Recaptures original Monkey Ball 1 and 2 with consistent, responsive, and comfortable controls, wildly creative levels with thorough difficulty diversity, and addictive gamemodes that put those levels to their best possible uses. Only thing it's missing is fun nifty minigames like the old, not-trash Monkey Ball games had. If this gets a sequel, hope we see paper airplane toss for a Monkey Target style glider minigame and some racetracks that let you garner crazy amounts of speed that feel good to maintain. Edit: After playing for enough hours, here's some more in-depth critique: Presentation: The game dropped the paperball on this in a few VERY minor areas. 1) If you game over, the voice line for Coco where she asks if she made it too difficult is way too quiet and hard to hear over the game over music. There are other examples of voice lines being far too difficult to hear for where they are used, but that one is the most noticeable I think. The devs didn't quite seem to realize that it was actually a design decision and not a thematic one that the original Monkey Ball announcer was loud and shout-y and had effects put on his voice that somewhat sounded like he was talking to a stadium through a speaker. It ensured he was audible no matter what music was playing or sound effects were going off. 2) The intro cutscene has inconsistent VA quality. The dog teacher and laughing raccoons sound... off, the dog teacher in particular sounding like he's just some guy in his earlier twenties throwing his hat into the ring of voice acting for funsies. Not to knock the VA or anything but just in terms of objective performance quality, he sounded like he was putting on a deeper voice than he normally had and it was painfully obvious, whereas Coco herself sounds fantastic and cute and charming and pleasant and airy and everything she needs to sound like for her art depiction and role as stage announcer. 3) If your paperball gets stuck between two objects, it just clips through them and gets spat out wherever it is able to, which makes sense. It's a Unity game, the physics probably cannot guarantee zero clipping in such circumstances. However, I thought it'd be a neat quick-fix to have a sort of 'ball-smooshing' animation whenever the ball is crushed by something. It IS a paper ball, after all, so perhaps when it gets smooshed between two objects, an animation on the ball can play that flattens it according to where the two points of contact occurred, and it would be strictly visual so it would not impact paperball handling what-so-ever. If not that (probably because it would be tedious to implement ball-squishing from any possible direction), then at least some paper shreds particle effects (matching your ball's color) that fly off your paperball combined with a loud crumple sound effect whenever the ball detects it has been crushed or forced to clip through something. Inconsistent Platinum Medal Difficulty: Some platinums are absolute BEASTS that require totally mastering a level after dozens and dozens and dozens of attempts, and other platinums, I kid you not, I achieved over SIX FULL SECONDS (on Broken Twister) faster than the platinum medal time within 3 attempts on a stage or less. Gables is also one of them I remember off the top of my head where I had a solid 2 or 3 seconds on the platinum time within 5 attempts. On top of this, numerous platinum medals are genuinely NOT possible unless you use a technique that I originally thought was the result of slightly under-tested mouse/keyboard control scheme, but apparently not. It is called 'boosting' and can be done on controller too, and is performed by moving at a diagonal angle instead of straight forward/left/right, which results in noticeably superior acceleration power. If you aren't comfortable with using this technique, a large swath of platinum medals are quite literally impossible for you. As someone who got all the platinum medals in medal mode, I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but I do think there should be some sort of hint or teaching moment to inform the player that the 'boosting' technique exists. Now, I get that there's a LOT of stages and making the platinums super tight and flawless on every single one would have taken a lot of time by the devs in the playtesting stages, and I also get that CHANGING platinum medal times to be shorter would rob people of past victories and make them feel cheated, but if this ever gets a sequel, commission some of the best paperball players you can find to grind out all the levels for you and screenshot their times to base the platinums off of. Hell, I'd do it for free in such a hypothetical, I adore this game. False Platinum Medal Times: It has happened to me thrice now that I get a goal time that is an exact match of the platinum medal time (say, 16:88 for platinum and I get exactly 16:88 on the clock) and it DOES NOT give me my platinum. I recall on one past stage though that I DID match it perfectly and it DID give me my platinum medal. Seems the game's internal logic timer is EVEN more precise than what is shown to the player on-screen or something. If this can at all be remedied with an update, it should be. I have screenshot proving I matched the platinum medal time down to the exact milisecond and it denied me my platinum on Pong, and it also happened on Clock Hands, too. A bit too few noob-friendly levels: I dunno if this game will ever get worked on again, or if a sequel is even feasible in cliax games' budget/time frames (given this game alone saw multiple content updates and DLC and no doubt took a HUGE amount of work just to get where it is right now) but I think the game could benefit from a few dozen more levels that are more in line with what someone 12 or younger could be capable of accomplishing. I get that the more creative and engaging a level is, the unavoidably more difficult it HAS to be by design, and blitz mode is a nice handicap for less skilled players to have a better chance at seeing and beating tougher levels anyway, but I noticed the game has a lot of levels difficult in their own right and with neat gimmicks (clearly designed to satisfy monkey ball fans, which they do very successfully), but not enough levels that are just designed more about showcasing a fun and satisfying use of the physics engine while simultaneously having generally low difficulty. Things like nestling yourself into a catapult and being launched onto a huge bouncepad that flings you into a giant basket that is practically guaranteed to catch you, or going down an insanely steep ramp that starts at 45 degrees, then turns into a sheer 90 degree drop, then a 110 degree ramp so it's literally inverted and you're just free-falling, then shifts back into an 80-degree ramp again near the bottom. Fun stuff like that that is generally simple/straightforward to accomplish and leaves the player with a feeling of "Wow, that was so cool!" instead of "Wow, that was tough!". The golf-club-level in Cherry Skies is a decent but rather mild example of this type of level. Overall: None of this changes how much I love this game, it's still fantastic and everyone who even SLIGHTLY enjoyed any monkey ball game at any point in their lives should buy this (and the DLCs) and play it. It is a PHENOMENAL amount of enjoyment/playtime for a weirdly low and generous price tag. Edit2: Also, just had to add, the OST is unbelievably stellar. IMO it's literally better than the OG Monkey Ball OSTs. Psychedelic is my favorite, but I couldn't think of a single one that came off as forgettable/bland. They're all wonderfully catchy and absolute fire. If half of the game's entire budget went into paying the composer, I wouldn't even be slightly surprised. The music truly is SHOCKINGLY excellent across the board, give the amount of tracks in the game.

Knows how to leverage its physics to make for interesting and engaging stage designs. A must play for any fan of the original Super Monkey Ball games.

Ty so much soda crab for bringing awareness to this hidden gem of a game.

This is as close as we will get to peak balling.

Am I glad I found this game. In these last few days of the Steam Summer Sale I decided to dig deep and see if I could find a hidden gem that is easy to pick up but hard to master. So I started searching with the tags "Arcade" and "Time Attack" and there Paperball was. I tried out the demo and was instantly sold. Really loving the full game so far and looking forward to see how it escalates in difficulty. Whether it goes awry halfway through or sticks the landing, I'm already having a ton of fun and that alone is worth the very low price of admission (even without a discount). Edit: This is charming and cruel, I love it. Edit 2: Yep, this is indeed kino.

Smartly designed levels, intuitive controls, a unique visual style and great music/sound design. This is a fantastic game and is well worth the price. Definitely give it a shot!

Knockoff super monkey ball, good marble platformer for the price.

Comparisons to Super Monkey Ball are inevitable; this feels like it was made by SMB fans, for SMB fans. As the game progresses, the levels get very difficult. Just about as hard as SMB's hardest levels, or even harder. The quick retries and being able to resume runs make the increased difficulty more approachable. It's easy to step back and try something else for a while, then pick back up where you left off. There's a good variety of modes for an alternate spin on things and time medals to chase, so it's overall fun, even for folks who haven't played SMB.