This may be a bit of a different kind of post for me.

This is a sports game. You control a pinball on a board with ally pinballs and enemy pinballs (which can be bots or other players, online or offline). Scattered around the map are bumpers; collide with one, and it will change to your team’s color and send you flying off in another direction uncontrollably for a split second or so. At set points during the match, the gate to the goal opens up, and when you enter it, your team gets points based on how many of the bumpers you hit are still your team’s color (you also get points for combos, I think), at which point you’re sent back onto the map to gather more points. You can see which team is in the lead by looking at the bars on the lower left of the screen. At the end of a match, it tries to do that Splatoon thing where the teams’ scores slowly increase, then suddenly charge at each other to reveal the winner, but the winning team’s score still increases faster during the “build up” phase (at least, if they have a big enough lead). As for controls, you have a double jump, a “stomp” move that can temporarily take out opponents, a “spin” move that lets you wall-jump or boots forward (depending on if you hit a wall or the ground, respectively), and a dash move that sends you in the direction you pointed at a fixed speed for about a second. If you use the dash move in mid-air, your previous trajectory and momentum instantly returns when the dash is over, which definitely takes some getting-used-to.

If that sounds interesting to you and you want to know more details about it, that’s too bad because I’m not a fan of competitive multiplayer games (If you’re wondering why I got this game, it was free on Twitch Prime), so aside from the tutorial, I ignored that mode and went for the single-player “parkour challenges,” a set of 28 obstacle courses which each take less than a minute to beat on a successful run. Same controls, but the objective is to jump through all the green rings on the course and reach the end as fast as possible. The closest you get to opponents are the leaderboards for fastest time beating the levels (which is currently held by a user with “TAS” in the name. HMMM…!!!), and besides bottomless pits, the courses don’t have any hazards by default. Both at the start and during your attempts at clearing a course, you can see how much time (left) you have in order to get a bronze/silver/gold star, and at the end, you’re shown your time, star rank, and are given options to play the next stage, play the previous stage (the one before the stage you just beat), see the leaderboards, or return to the menu. If you’re wondering where “retry” is, there’s a small, grayed-out prompt at the top of the screen that tells you which button to hold down to retry the course; at first, I was annoyed that there was barely any indication for this, but I did like that I could manually restart the course mid-attempt since it’s faster than waiting for the game to realize you fell down into the void again.

The level design is actually pretty good for the most part. Levels start off easy and get progressively more difficult, though there is the occasional level that ends up being a spike or dip in difficulty. Bumpers show up, but rather than be for points, they’re either used as obstacles you have to avoid or springboards you have to use to progress. Levels are also fairly straightforward, so it usually isn’t a problem to see what’s coming, and if you do end up needing to change direction, you can start spinning in that direction, and when you hit the ground, the camera will rotate around you to point in the direction you’re facing. The problem I had is with the game’s physics: not only can bumpers be unreliable in where they throw you and how fast, but the simple fact that you need momentum on your ball to make some of these jumps makes it difficult to be precise; it’s less about skill and more about trial and error so you know exactly how long to hold the jump button so you neither undershoot nor overshoot that tiny platform out in the distance all by itself. Heck, even if you hit a wall, you get reflected to a different trajectory rather than hug the wall. When everything works, it can be pretty fun, but when things don’t work, it isn’t uncommon for the culprit to be the physics throwing you slightly off, where doing basically the same input results in success.

One thing you may notice is that there’s a second page to the list of parkour challenges. Could this be another set of new levels? Nope; it’s just “gauntlet” versions of the same 28 courses; they have the same land/wall/bumper/booster placements, just with blades and lasers added at various points (and the occasional path replaced with moving platforms). For the most part, it isn’t too bad, and even helps to spice up some of the levels. However, it does bring another problem into focus: the camera. At first, this is only really noticeable when you need to wall jump up a wall since you’ll inevitably bounce off, causing the camera to flip 180 degrees, disorienting you when you just wanted to keep going forward. The game also has half-pipes that send you to a higher or lower floor, but rather than the camera rotating with you to keep the path below eye level, the camera simply slides up, then again, rotates 180 degrees into the pipe when you reach the end. At first, this isn’t too bad since there’s usually no surprises placed right after a half-pipe, but in the “gauntlet” version of stages, it’s rare for there not to be some kind of laser trap that you have barely (if any) time to react to. This could also be filed under “bad level design,” but I think it might’ve been able to work if the camera had been tweaked a bit more.

Overall, I’m not sure if I can recommend this game. You’d obviously need to enjoy the multiplayer to get the most out of it, and you’d also have to be able to enjoy physics-based games, but even if you get it on sale, there isn’t a lot to the single player. As stated before, it’s less about moment-to-moment challenge and more about getting the best time (and if you care about the leaderboards, that Tool Assisted Speedrunner might give you pause).