Starball, QuantamSquid Interactive’s highly addictive new ball-rolling game, has recently been released and is available from the app store. Superb tilt controls and an insatiable need to better our score have made this game nearly impossible to put down.
Starball is both simple in presentation and game mechanics. The object is to roll your green ball around the rectangular board and collect the stars that randomly pop up. Each star collected adds a point to your score, as well as adding a tiny red hazardous ball that bounces back and forth either horizontally or vertically. There is only one star available at a time and each new star brings a new red ball into play. Power-ups in the form of a question mark also appear randomly, offering several temporary benefits. These power-ups include: SloMo (slows the speed of the red balls), Shrinkage (reduces the size of your green ball), Time-Freeze (pauses all red balls), Ball Bomb (explodes all red balls in a small radius from your green ball), Invinciball (destroys any red balls touched by your ball), and Ballbuster (destroys all hazards on the board). A gauge at the screen bottom indicates the length of time left on any current power-up. They are used up quickly, so move fast and keep an eye on the meter. Once your green ball contacts any red ball, the game ends.
There are three levels of play: Beginner, Normal, and Insane. Beginner is very easy, allowing you to get a feel for the game while the red balls appear after every other collected star. Normal creates a red ball for each star collected, and Insane gets crazy quickly, as each collected star produces two red balls. Better pray for the Ballbuster and don’t expect to rack up huge scores here. There is a calibrate option to optimize gameplay. We found it was helpful to re-calibrate from time to time, as the center seemed to shift slightly over time. This can be done in the middle of a game from the pause menu if necessary. This is the type of game where one false move can ruin your game and leave you feeling that if you just avoided that one ball or just showed some patience, you could still be playing. Seriously, we had to force ourselves to put down the game so that we could write the review.
The graphics are very clean, perfect for the simple nature of the game. There is no soundtrack, but there are a few sound effects. An original music soundtrack is planned for an update, so we’re curious to see if it’s decent or not. At the very least, we’d hope for the option to be able to listen to music from our library, too. Controls are spot-on, purely accelerometer-based, yet we have all the control necessary to rip across the board and stop on a dime. We were quite surprised at how well they worked, which could easily have been a gamebreaker if they didn’t.
Starball uses OpenFeint to track leaderboards for the three difficulty levels. QuantumSquid plans to add graphical themes, new power-ups, new gameboard shapes and sizes, and OpenFeint achievements. Replay value is great (did we mention we couldn’t put it down?), with the aforementioned items making it that much more irresistible. For the ridiculously low price of $0.99, our 5-Dimple obsession could be keeping you up at night, too.
Starball gets our AppSmile 5-Dimple rating:
