The PC port of this oddball shooter is still great fun… if you can find anyone online to play it with.

One of the most difficult aspects of videogame critique is managing to pull yourself from the games you’re intending to review long enough to actually write about them. When I reviewed the Xbox Live Arcade version of Madballs in Babo: Invasion several months back, it proved to be a surprisingly good little shooter. A great little shooter even, that managed to leech several days of my life from me as my goal to unlock every character, weapon and ability became an obsession. But Madballs proved a brief fixation, and after giving the game all manner of praise and a (perhaps too generous) 9/10 score I suddenly found I had no desire to play it any more.

That’s not to say that Madballs still isn’t a fun little title, mind. Based on an obscure toy-line and animated series that scarcely impacted British shores, those hideous spheres recently saw new life in both an Art Asylum toy range and this starring role in Canadian developer Playbrains’ sequel to freeware top-down shooter BaboViolent 2. Madballs in…retains that top-shooter perspective, but can also be played from a third-person view. What there is of a plot sees the rival Madballs factions (the good B*D*I and wicked Scorched Militia) crash-land onto the planet Babo, where the hostile inhabitants are also conveniently bodiless.

The primary impetus gripping most players for the first dozen or so hours of Madballs will be to unlock the various extras that are almost all inaccessible from the start. While you begin with only one character and one weapon from each faction, new elements are consciously added one at a time, via points scored or actions fulfilled in both the 10 level campaign (single player and co-op) and multiplayer modes. It’s incredibly compulsive stuff; the handy Unlock Menu informs you what you’ll need to obtain the next extra, and for the first few hours you’re only ever ten minutes away from that coveted new character class or missile launcher with which other players have repeatedly thrashed you online. The Madballs themselves all have distinctive personalities and abilities (a tap skill and a charge skill) and each weapon has a secondary mode… which must also be unlocked.