I tried the Next Fest demo for this one a while back and wasn’t too impressed with it, but after it went free and I saw that one of the updates included level design and gameplay tweaks, I decided to give it another chance.

• Wonder Ball
  

  12 hours playtime

  15 of 33 achievements

3D platformer. Left stick moves, A double-jumps, RB dashes, X does a ground pound, holding RT electrocutes things nearby (like switches or enemies), LB and LT use healing/temporary-shield items, and when you reach the final world 1 level, you gain the ability to shrink by pushing B (which disables all your other abilities except moving and double-jumping, but lets you go through small areas).

There are five worlds, each with their own overworld containing four levels, four arenas, one “final” level for when you beat all the other levels/arenas, and some scattered optional items. The overworlds themselves are overly massive and bland, to the point where I’m pretty sure they’re all just store-bought assets with minimal changes; the only real way you can find anything is by using the compass markers at the top of the screen since you’re bound to get lost otherwise. There are some scattered drones you can spend healing items to fix that’ll let you fast-travel straight to any of the world’s levels/arenas, but 1) you also have to reach the drones just the same as you’d have to reach the levels/arenas, and 2) fast-traveling everywhere means you’re skipping over the scattered computer chips that you’ll need to buy upgrades, so you’ll rarely use fast travel anyway.

Then there are the arenas. All of them take place in what is effectively the same large, flat arena (just with some cosmetic differences between worlds) where you have to fight waves of tank-robots that all attack you asynchronously, and when you combine that with how close you need to be to electrocute them, you realize it’s impossible to avoid all of their attacks and you can’t win unless you use the healing items and shields that you’re showered with during the rest of the game. Even if you buy attack/max hp/range upgrades, you won’t be able to keep tabs on all of them and can get cheap-shot by an attack from off-camera. The bots get a few different weapons as the game progresses, but it doesn’t really change anything when you can just keep healing/shielding yourself. Also, the arenas are all mandatory to unlock the worlds’ final levels and to progress to the next world despite being such an obvious diversion from the core platformer gameplay (a diversion that won’t appeal to all platformer fans).

The levels themselves are okay, but they’re all hamstrung by one crucial decision: all the enemies are in the arenas, so none are in the levels. This means the only hazards in the levels are either instakill stuff (like falling in the water) or stuff like the exploding ! crates that stay gone even if they kill you. As a result, a significant portion of all the levels’ challenges involve waiting on moving platforms (boring) and/or dashing across long distances without a platform, and since dashing is always a fixed-length, it’s not easy to aim yourself accurately even if you save your double-jump for the end (and it doesn’t help that your jumps themselves are very fast and heavy). This means that if you fail a jump, the stuff you have to redo is waiting on moving platforms instead of actually engaging with the game, and it starts to get kinda tedious after a while (especially since checkpoints can be a bit too far apart sometimes). To make matters worse, your dashes refill on a cooldown instead of instantly refreshing when you land like other platformers do (even dying doesn’t speed up the cooldown), so that’s just more waiting you’ll need to do. It takes until world 3 for the game to finally start using moving (instakill) hazards that don’t permanently disappear if they touch you, but even then, they mostly just patrol sections of large platforms, and the bulk of the levels still revolve around moving platforms and long-distance multi-dashing. It gets extra annoying when you reach world 4 and realize the only way to beat those levels is to buy max-dash upgrades because you can’t reach the next platform with your default three dashes.

Oh, and the death walls are the same color as regular glass (or at least a very similar color). They’re supposed to have this electricity effect to differentiate themselves, but that effect doesn’t always show up, so it’s easy to get the two confused.

Overall, the game can be frustrating sometimes, but it’s okay for a free game, so I can recommend it.