They released another world of levels as downloadable content for a few bucks, which seems like a pretty good deal since it increases the game's content by 50%. *resists urge to make "get on the ball" joke* I don't know what you do in multiplayer matches, and I'm unlikely to unless they add a real matchmaking service at some point-like almost all multiplayer games have these days. There's a multiplayer mode, which seems to consist only of invitation matches-no matchmaking at all as far as I could tell, which means that you won't be playing this online unless you call up a buddy of yours and convince them to log in and reply to your invitation. Supposedly more stages will be coming along in downloadable content at some point, and I will probably be sucker enough to buy them. The UI is kind of misleading, because you can see space for more types of stages, but once you complete the first two worlds and get to the third world's selection space, it just says "more to come" or something like that. Still, the playing, on the non-cheap-invulnerable-blockade levels anyway, is really fun, and only ends because you run out of levels: the game currently weighs in at about 25 (or maybe it was 24) pirate stages, followed by an equal number of knight stages. You can't really plan that kind of thing on most of the stages, so pretty much the score comes out the same every time, and is thus pointless. Completion time doesn't factor in at all, although it darn well should, and while you can in theory get combination bonuses, in practice these come very rarely-your ball has to get trapped somewhere and bounce around forever, and maybe you throw in a few powerup lighting strikes and things in the meantime, before any combo bonus will appear. Scoring also isn't handled very well you get a score per stage, but it seems pretty fixed. It's all quite a bit of simple fun, and not all that hard, except that toward the end they start putting in annoying things like rows of unbreakable metal bollards right in front of your paddle that ding the ball right at you and out of play, causing you to lose a "life." Things like that feel a little cheap, and I think they could have come up with better ways to make the play risky. You can equip your paddle with machine guns, a bazooka, or lasers, get larger balls, have your balls split into three (and if you get another triple ball after that, then you've suddenly got nine balls in play simultaneously, etc), cause an earthquake that shakes up all the blocks in the level, bring on a wind storm that blows all the blocks toward one side of the screen, and "more." Smashing blocks of course sometimes unleashes powerups for you to grab, and although some of these don't seem to do much, like the one that turns day to night, and one is really annoying-the crazy ball that makes the ball move in an unpredictable way, argh-most of them are pretty fun. This is all miles and miles beyond what any game of this type that I've seen has ever attempted, and it looks great, runs for the most part without slowdown (there are slight minor hitches now and then), and looks gorgeous thanks to lush lighting and smooth, colorful textures that paint highly detailed 3D storybook scenes you just can't wait to smash to bits. For instance, you may bash away the beach and island holding up a tower, which then topples over, strewing blocks or rocks across the playfield, which then have to be smashed up. The incorporated Havok physics engine ensures that the ball rebounds off this very irregular geometry in convincing fashion, and that the geometry crumbles and piles consistently. Instead of just bouncing a nondescript ball off a nondescript paddle up the screen into colored blocks, Magic Ball has you bouncing a soccer-like ball off a rounded wooden paddle sort of thing off into the distance, where it smashes through highly detailed arrangements of either seascapes, pirates, ships and sharks, or forests, knights, castles, and dragons.
#MAGIC ORBZ PS3 POSTER PC#
Downloadable port of a five-year-old PC game, Magic Ball is far and away the most detailed ball-and-paddle (ie Arkanoid-see entry 748) game I've ever seen.
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