Steel Punk Ball

Steel Punk Ball is a simplistic time challenge/obstacle course game where you control an annoyingly sluggish ball through a series of simple courses. Various obstacles like doors, switches, and pistons that push you off course or block your path add to the challenge. Frustratingly, there's no clear map for each level so you have to fail and repeat some of the levels before you can work out what has to be done. Also, levels are locked behind a series of "stars", which means to progress you need to repeat levels you've already completed to improve your time. I have to admit that the "irony" is particularly strong when a game all about a steel ball is so badly "unpolished". The icing on the cake is there's only one song for the game, and it repeats every level, ad nauseum. And the developer made sure you have to repeat levels very, very often. Buy this only if you like mediocre dubstep, but only want to hear one song, forever.

Hardware: Windows 10, i5 3570, GTX 1070, no problems. Graphics are good, as can be seen from the video. There appears to be only one music track, and it's pretty repetitive. The overall sound design could be stronger. The ball physics feel good; the ball has a good, solid weight, though it doesn't seem to accelerate enough on downhill slopes. Going uphill can feel painfully slow if you don't start with enough momentum. The ability to boost your speed with a button press (and using a finite resource to do so) would be welcome. I would like the ball to have a rolling sound; right now it is silent. The game supports a 360 controller; left stick moves the ball. I had expected right stick to let me rotate the camera, but it didn't do anything and there's no controls menu. It doesn't make it impossible to play, but it does feel a bit unintuitive to have a good view of the ball only when moving on the Y axis. The levels start out very easy and quick to finish, slowly introducing new concepts. Traps so far (I played through level 9) are designed to slow you down rather than "kill" you, for example, to reduce the speed of the ball, or to knock you off the proper path, causing you to lose time to get back. You have a set number of seconds to finish a level, and either fail, or get rated one, two or three stars based on how well you did. Powerups on the levels increase your remaining time. Not all are mandatory, and there are some in out of the way places you may need to make the best time. You can repeat a level right away for a better time if you wish, though the only purpose of a better time is for your personal level-by-level records. Getting the best score for a level will require some trial and error as you learn the optimal path. I suspect later levels will require a fair bit of trial and error to finish them in time, as the size and complexity was ramping up rather quickly as I reached level 10. I've never played any other similar games (such as Marble Drop), so I can't compare to them, but the game seems fairly priced at $2.