Recent reviews by jon john johnson

fun game and shockingly well designed progression (other than mid-end game where some upgrades started requiring a small amount of grinding to get). worth the price even if short. devs were talking about endless modes too so we'll have to see how that goes. difficulty is overall quite good, with my only nitpicks being there are some instances of earlier bosses being harder than some later bosses, and the last 3 levels are quite a jump in difficulty from the rest of the game.

tldr; potential rating is 10/10, current rating is 6.5/10 due to issues.
on a foundational level, this is a fantastic game that i would recommend anyone picks up and tries. it's both extremely fun for casual players and has massive competitive potential. however, as of release day, there are still a lot of critical problems that severely impact gameplay.

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1 - dubious netcode, to put it lightly : weird rollbacks and server-side resolutions resulting in broken animations, desyncs, balls going through your legs in defensive stance, ball going through the keeper's hands, certain inputs getting straight eaten by the server (ex: defensive dash into goalie dive if performed too quickly in succession), etc. i have personally also experienced several DCs mid-match where every player would keep moving in the direction they had been until i reconnect, the problem was not on my end since discord was working completely fine while it was happening.
2 - a few unbalanced and unpolished mechanics : some mechanics need work, with the most obvious one being the passing system on mouse and keyboard. even while practicing it in a vacuum it never quite feels like the ball goes where you input it to go, and it also seems to instantly snap to a completely different direction if you input even a nanometer away from where you were previously aiming near the end of your pass motion, which will inevitably sometimes happen due to human inaccuracy. a few goalkeeper options are also actually terrible, with forward dive (in a few key scenarios), neutral dive and tackles in particular being very unreliable at higher levels of play, each for different reasons. this is especially felt when paired with the netcode issues. dives also uncommonly make you punch the ball away rather than catch it, and while im sure there is a concrete reason for this, it just adds more inconsistency to the game and feels bad. the aiming system when shooting the ball is a little strange as well since the ball never quite goes exactly where you're aiming, it always goes a little higher or lower. the off-center crosshair also contributes to making it less than ideal.
3 - common crashes and visual bugs : self-explanatory, it feels like every other match someone crashes or bugs out with their inputs not registering. the UI also commonly fails to display properly, for example sometimes some players in a group won't see the ongoing queue, while others will.

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there are a few other issues, but to me those are the main ones; if just those were all fixed, the game would be in a state where i'd personally be very happy with it.

dunno what this other reviewer is on about, combat feels superb and skill-based. the overall game looks, feels and sounds great. i would like to see a bit more content though (more floors, enemies, power-ups, weapons/spells, etc). in the future, additional systems would be nice too, because it feels like you can be exposed to most of what the game has to offer rather quickly. in the end one thing is for sure: what IS there is very polished.

7/10 right now, could go up to even a 10 with well thought-out content.

great game, has that magical feel around it that is lost in modern titles; if you're even slightly curious, just buy it

ball game

Words cannot do justice to how great this game is.

Improvement on the original in almost every way. This is coming from someone who's favourite game of all time is actually the old Toejam & Earl on the Sega Genesis. Had a blast playing through this and discovering all the new fun variations and mechanics that were added.

10/10

Unlike anything I've seen before; what a fantastic game.

This game, it quickly became one of, if not, my favourite game back in the alpha stage 2 years ago. It's easy to learn but very hard to master, in fact, no one has even come close to mastering it yet. But don't let that scare you, after training and just playing around with friends for a little bit, when you become a little more adapted and better at the game, you will get addicted, it is a ton of fun. I absolutely recommend this game to anyone who's interested, you should all give it a try, it's wonderful.

tldr: good game, buy it