Putt-Putt® and Pep's Balloon-o-Rama is one of the worst games I have ever played. This is one of the first and only games I think I have played where I genuinely was falling asleep while playing it, just because of how boring it is.
So basically it's like Arkanoid or Breakout. You shoot a ball and hit blocks, or balloons in this case, and break them. Break all of em and you win the stage. The catch is, once you fire the ball you have to keep bouncing it by moving your 'paddle' beneath the cursor under the ball to keep bouncing the ball bouncing around. If it touches the ground, game over. That's it. You get 3 lives to start, and an extra life at 1000, 2500, and 5000 points. That's it. If you lose all your lives, you have to restart the level, so it's not a great penalty but it resets your score.
There's a few powerups, but I think most of them actually are more harmful than good. Let me go through all of them here.
There's one which makes Putt-Putt, your paddle, a little longer. This means you theoretically have more paddle to hit the ball with. However, this game has stage hazards. Later on there's many many many stage hazards. Sometimes it's just things that lower your score, which is still annoying since you need score to get extra lives, sometimes it's a bucket or a bowling ball that disables you for a second or two, which is usually long enough to stall you so you drop the ball and lose a life. Long Putt-Putt just makes you weaker.
Then there's the hover boots for Pep, Putt-Putt's dog, aka the ball you're hitting here. The hover boots make it so every time Pep comes into contact with Putt-Putt he just hovers above you can you get the chance to fire him off again up into the air. This might sound useful, however there are many balloons in every stage that you can't get to by just your initial shot. So this powerup basically just wastes your time, and I never found a single instance where it felt useful.
There's the space helmet, which gives Pep low gravity when he's bouncing around the stage. This is somewhat useful, because it slows down your gameplay, and it does seem to allow Pep to bounce higher. You'd think this would basically be really useful for grabbing items and stuff when they fall - in actuality it really just changes the timing of grabbing stuff, it doesn't necessarily make it easier.
Then there's the cape. The cape is arguably the only unambiguously good powerup, because it lets Pep ghost through everything in the stage. This effectively turns him into a chainsaw where, once you have a good rally going you can just annihilate everything on the stage in a few arcing tosses while racking up huge points. So not only is it great, it's fun to use. Too bad like every other power up it's on a VERY short timer.
The thing about that is, powerups don't last until your next death or anything like that. Powerups only last a set amount of time. Interestingly, this can actually go between stages, so if you pick up a powerup in one stage, and move onto the next one quickly enough, you can have it in the next stage too. For a while.
This is one of the biggest things though that kills the game dead, and it's that every powerup is INCREDIBLY scarce. I think over 120 levels, all of which I played, I pretty much only had powerups for maybe 12-15 of those. It genuinely felt like I never ever saw them. But no.
So let's get into why this game is so bad.
First, the physics are just not very good. They're not fun to play with and it all feels weighted against the player, in terms of the fact that the ball rarely gets very long in the air.
It does not help that the stages aren't constructed for fun. There's no stage in this game, which you would expect, where you get to actually bounce the ball up to the top of the stage and watch as it bounces around on the top row of balloons. You'd THINK that'd be a stage in this game, right? Everyone knows that in Arkanoid, one of the most satisfying things you can do is to get the ball trapped at the top so it keeps bouncing around on the blocks and against the wall of the stage. This game, doesn't seem to understand that at all.
So the powerups suck and the stages aren't fun, what's worse than that? Why of course, incredibly annoying and tedious to deal with stage objects such as bumpers, that bump the ball back in the direction it came. There's also what I can only describe as spinning fans, if the ball touches them the balls gets sent in a random direction at a random velocity. This is about as much fun as it sounds.
And on top of that, there's also balloons carrying buckets. Buckets are COMPLETELY indestructible, you have to pop a balloon somewhere above the bucket, which means you have to approach that balloon from an angle. This is one of the most frustrating parts of maybe the last 20-30 levels of the game, but especially the last 10 or so, they start to REALLY overuse the buckets, to the point where there are several stages that are just wall-to-wall buckets with 1 or 2 very narrow gaps, and it's very nearly pixel-perfect to get the ball in there top pop the balloons carrying the buckets and begin to make any progress on the stage.
And all this in a game... for kids.
Somewhat like Pajama Sam Sock Works, this game pretty much completely gives up the pretense it was designed with kids in mind after a certain point, because it gets REALLY hard. I think they must have known that too, because, there's a cheats menu called 'junior helper' if you just hover the mouse at the bottom of the screen in the level select. 'Junior helper' seems very telling to me, because it probably means they realized late in production they made this game WAY too hard.
You'd think with a game like this, it'd probably be pretty easy, pretty fun, it'd have powerups every single level and every single one would just shower you in points. But no. For some reason, this game has the structure of an old arcade game, where you only get up to 3 extra lives from score, it actually tracks score, and your score resets on game over. It's bizarre to me, because this is obviously a game for your PC, it's made for very small children, and I literally can't fathom why they thought the levels should be designed the way they were. It's atrocious.
Even aside from the level design, just the utter tedium of sometimes just having to wait for the ball to bounce where you want it to go, is INCREDIBLY frustrating, the game's framerate and the general lack of responsiveness of the ball makes this game seriously sleep-inducing, and even the one one two quality music tracks in this game (low bitrate as they are) aren't enough to keep me interested. This game is, at times, exactly as exciting as watching grass grow.
I beat all 120 levels just because, I knew it wouldn't really be that long of a game and I was curious to see what else there might be to see later on, but there really wasn't anything interesting. I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone! Especially not kids.
