Madballs in Babo: Invasion Review

It's no secret that Xbox Live Arcade games without the buoyancy of a licence or well-known series often sink without trace. The first Geometry Wars may have sold and sold, but it was a novelty that benefited from exquisite timing: for the first few months it had precious little competition on Xbox's new digital download service.

Today, your brand new IP, still gloopy in its womb juices, competes with venerable re-releases cherry-picked from the canon - Ikaruga, Gunstar Heroes, Street Fighter II HD and so on. Or, worse still, goes toe-to-toe for players' Microsoft Points with million-dollar, EA-marketed heavyweights such as Battlefield 1943, a game that's one musket and a single-player campaign shy of a full-priced boxed release. So yeah: a license can be crucial.

But even so: Madballs. Really? That's what you're going with?

The 20-year-old toy line, for those too young or old to remember, consisted of a selection of rubber balls moulded with ugly faces - sort of like a collectable set of decapitated Garbage Pail Kids. Madballs in Babo: Invasion is an ugly game, all brown terrain, luminous green rivers and splurge gun splatter textures. The environments are robust and detailed but in this 12-year-old boy's bedroom of a world there's little beauty.

The Saturday morning kids' TV aesthetic extends to the wailing guitar soundtrack, exclamation point-ridden dialogue and gunge-tank humour. But don't dismiss this as a misguided anachronism. The licence may be aimed at the kind of eighties schoolkids who'd buy a Madballs character on eBay as an ironic student mantlepiece ornament, but the underlying game is built for those who love games regardless of their licence.

Part of the appeal is the way in which Madballs wears its influences on its sleeve. At first touch, the twin-stick shoot ‘em up appears to be an anthropomorphised Geometry Wars. The feeling is reinforced by the scaling-score multiplier pick-ups and the secondary top-down camera that shifts the default isometric view overhead.

At one point you fight a giant boss that sings Elvis songs at you.

But as the single-player campaign unfurls, it becomes clear that Madballs' designers have drawn inspiration from a wider range of titles. Guiding your Madball along centimeter-wide walkways and over vats of bubbling larva before dropping ten-feet onto a flipswitch is pure Marble Madness.

The game's second boss is a giant flaming boulder that splits into two, smaller boulders every time its health is depleted, until the environment is rippling with fiery ball bearings - which brings Asteroids to mind. Likewise, the limitation of two weapons at any one time ensures every new weapon pick-up becomes a tactical decision of Master Chief magnitude.

In the single-player campaign much of your time is spent rolling through corridored environments, shooting down enemies and flipping switches to unlock gates en route to a climactic boss fight. As the game progresses the switch puzzles become more complex and enemy waves more regular, but the rhythm and flavour of missions rarely changes.

At checkpoints it's possible to change into a different Madball form, each one with its own unique ability. These might enable you to temporarily ping around an environment like an enraged pinball, or pop to twice your normal size in order to crush enemies. However as the designers grant you the choice of which form to take at any one point, almost none of the puzzles or challenges require the use of a specific ability, neutering this tool's importance.

Enemy balls have elemental properties, so choosing the right weapon is key to securing quick takedowns. Checkpoints usually contain one or two new weapons to choose between, but you'll need to learn the levels before you know which will best match the coming enemies. Targeting enemies on ledges can also be irksome as the game's reticule adjusts its targeted plane on-the-fly, leading to some frustrating moments where you attempt to fend off multiple attackers at various heights.

Considering it's 800 MSP Madballs is packed with content; the single-player campaign's relative brevity is counterbalanced by a raft of multiplayer modes. Avatar Attack is a cute and enjoyable diversion, taking your Xbox 360 avatar's head and tooling it up with rocket launchers, flamethrowers and shuriken guns in a Deathmatch mode. As you shoot down your rivals, so your head grows in size, earning a health boost at the cost of a speed downgrade with every growth spurt.

While some XBLA games rely too heavily on the mere novelty of adding avatars, here the underlying game is solid and enjoyable. The personalisation adds to the concept rather than attempting to redeem it.

A second innovative multiplayer mode, Invasion, allows two teams to place environment tiles one by one in order to design the level corporately, before fighting across it to secure their opponent's base. It's a good idea well-executed and provides welcome distraction from the other stock Deathmatch and team skirmish modes.

There's already an active player-base, so the multiplayer modes should hold their worth for a few months yet.

In single-player mode the game seems unsure of its identity. Half the game systems are geared towards serious score attack play, with multipliers for thorough enemy takedowns that must be balanced with rewards for speed and efficiency. But this focus is thrown off by the game's laboured puzzles. The endless parade of switches that must be thrown and passages that must be navigated becomes tiresome and repetitive.

This ensures that the game's top scorers will be those who learn the level layouts, taking a speed-run approach to mastery. Conversely, those players who prefer to rely on shmup-style reaction and fortune over planning and revision will be at a disadvantage.

In the multiplayer modes, the incentives towards teamwork and planning built into the creative game modes are, in practice, discarded for an everyman-for-himself approach. The simplicity of the core game mechanics combined with the speed and precise control of the ball avatars scuppers the need for real long-view tactics and planning.