Reviews VideoGame / Mitchell Productions Silverball

A poor man's Ball Revamped

Silverball doesn't make a good first impression. The title screen features amateurish 3D effects, but no instructions. Clicking "Play" just throws you into the first level. Fortunately, it soon becomes clear that this is a Ball Revamped clone where you control a ball with the arrow keys and have to guide it to the exit.

While the game does offer a varied selection of fun concepts and power-ups, most of them are just rehashed stuff from Ball Revamped. A few of the levels are just annoying, e.g. the Point Verde stages where a power-up makes the ball nearly impossible to see (in BR's equivalent, the ball isn't as hard to see). The stage design itself suggests a reasonable difficulty, but the strong gravity and overly sensitive controls make the game harder than it should be. To make matters worse, most of the levels are too cramped to let you play around and get used to the controls.

The first boss is okay, but unremarkable. The Final Boss does have a nice Bullet Hell-esque concept, but both phases are too repetitive for how long they drag on, the random walls of bullets are not always survivable (sometimes every gap is too small, or you just can't reach the one that's large enough in time), and the attack with bullets bouncing all over the screen is way too fast. The battle also seems to be buggy. I've had both phases suddenly end even though I was far from depleting the boss's HP (or maybe some of my hits dealt an insane amount of damage for some reason and I just didn't notice).

The visuals are unimpressive in general, but usually do their job. One annoyance is that the white background elements in the final battle look like enemy bullets. The Big Bad looks like it was drawn in five minutes with MS Paint's circle tool. Additionally, many of the levels themselves have ugly designs because the game only supports rectangular walls, but the creator tried to make curves and diagonals anyway instead of working around this limitation (like early BR games did). The result is levels that look they were sloppily drawn in a level editor. While it doesn't ruin them gameplay-wise, it does make the game look unappealing and amateurish.

One thing Silverball does have over Ball Revamped is that the former's music is more pleasant and less repetitive. I also have to give Mitchell Productions credit for actually citing jmtb02 as a source of inspiration.

The planned sequel seems to be stuck in Development Hell. From the trailer, it looks like it'll be more creative and original than its predecessor, but it still suffers from ugly level design and some dubious visuals (e.g. walls whose colours clash with the background, and the poorly-drawn stars that pop up between levels... just use the MS Paint star tool).

To be honest, you're better off just playing the Ball Revamped games instead (skip the first one). They do most of the stuff Silverball do — and tend to do it better.