Finished this up last night. I bought it because the aesthetic looked goofy and fun and I wanted to see what it was about; I was never much of a Pong player (Ponger :D ) , but I knew I had decent coordination at Pong wasn’t terrible at it.
The general story is that you’re a new paddle and the King, seeing that you’re young and enthusiastic, assigns you the role of evaluating your worth through sending you through a series of dungeons to recover some orbs to maintain the order of the kingdom; only problem is, all the paddles he sends through never seem to come back! There’s a bunch of elemental levels and from room to room you’ll encounter, some rinky-dink, some elementally appropriate, some challenging. There’s about 4 levels to each zone and several zones to play through. Throw in the concept of having balls with behavioral properties such as “bouncy” or “ricochet” to “wall”, “flower”, “fire”, “water”, “lizard”, and a myriad of other balls, and you basically have a party on your hands.
Life is measured in terms of hit points literally; a “buff ball” carries a heftier amount of damage (-5) than an average hit (-1) per exchange between enemy balls. Add in the consequence of missing shots, that’s more damage; you can level up, which each level offers you an enhancement that can be as persistent as a health capacity increase, health refill, or increase of a ball. Each level increase gets a little more clever as they try offering you a “critical point chance” or “luck” enhancement, graduating to the sort of level options that borders in goofy. Atari refers to it as a dungeon crawler, but I would consider it semi-rogue-like because if your HP gets worn down and you miss a critical point, game over, you get kicked out of the particular level in the zone with whatever balls you acquired, and you must start from the beginning of the particular zone level, which is randomized per playthrough. Your goal is to find the dungeon boss key, which can be placed at any end of a level through a myriad of rooms.
The game is fun, however there are a few drawbacks. One is, yes, you can customize your paddle by giving it a skin, a hat/decoration, face or suit; the issue that will come up is hit detection that can be influenced by how you dress your character. This can work against you if you wear a hat and you are playing against shots in a corner, because the game’s hit detection is slightly jank. The game idea is nice, but the implementation is shallow for the options it provides. Similarly, when you happen to win a turn to serve, the game will toss out a ball in any direction, even if I miss! I guess if you are just looking to be more nimble at pong than it gives you a chance, but the controls are very much bound for gamepad and keyboard as opposed to a dial, unlike the old school Atari equivalents the gameplay is based off. I played on normal difficulty.
As the levels progress, the non-hostile paddles that are more of the lost or frustrated variety emphasize one-liners about how the King is full of it. From an adult perspective, after this much time dedicated strictly to Pong, this definitely resonates; there are some mini-games like card matching, room lighting, pattern matching or ball guiding that are offered but these games are “lost in the sauce” as they are wedged in levels of particularly hostile rooms that knock off the nonsense.
The game starts off as simple enough, but by the end of it, I was running past rooms to avoid challenges from more idiotic characters (you can get challenged by entities such as a Judge, Mermaid, Penguin, Robot, Clown, Prison Guard, Police Officer, and other sorts of characters that really just have a punchline that get down to playing matches of Pong). Why? Because a lot of them will resort to using balls such as “mimic” balls (which are really symbolized by mirrors) and “lizard”, “venom”, or “poison” balls (which are designed purposefully to sap HP from your character); One lesson you’ll take away from this game, is much like the movie War Games (starring Matthew Broderick) emphasizes, “The only winning move is not to play”.
When I say “The only winning move is not to play”, I mean that as opposed to losing HP to particularly nasty AI, which per level in each zone you visit IS cumulative, skipping the match or just letting the ball hit (which the HP loss is not as severe as say, a fire ball) is the only way to win, by serving a superior tricky ball back to your opponent. At the beginning, the “bosses” are kind of difficult, having a much larger amount of HP than you (several hundreds of points vs tens of points, which is made to seem kind of daunting because really, a winning serve from you hits them at proportionally higher ratio than it hits you); by the time you’ve leveled up and gotten adept at this style of Pong, they are practically pushovers.
Overall, I’d say this was a fun game, one that definitely increased my skill, reaction time, and overall pong logic. The game is feature packed and funny, but sometimes at the expense of becoming grating.
Would I recommend this game to kids? Maybe in bits and pieces. There’s nothing mature rated about this game, but I think for kids it’s a difficult game. Like I said earlier, the game controls are not as authentic as the original game that appears in Atari collections, as accessible as they are for keyboard/gamepad. They do have a broken down multiplayer version without any of the powerups, but I’d say that this game is probably more geared toward adults/teens. I’d say that if you leave kids alone with it, maybe they’ll take a greater shining to it than I think, but I can’t say my youngest nieces and nephews may find it as interesting.
Definitely worth a buy if you’re interested.
