At a glance...

Madballs in Babo: Invasion review

We're used to licensed titles these days. Every major publisher has a bunch of them to bring in revenue in a less risky manner, sometimes deploying them around major new film releases. We're even used to licensed properties from the 1980s being brought back for games in the 21st Century, as evidenced by the release of Ghostbusters: The Video Game earlier this year. But that's for franchises that are around today. What we're not used to is seeing is mid-1980s American toys being reintroduced in this way. Madballs are characters in the shape of balls, popular in their time, but pretty much unknown today. Then, at E3, Canadian indie developer Playbrains announced they were bringing the franchise back, and not only that, but it would be in the form of a follow up to another reasonably unknown property, freeware title BaboViolent 2.

So, that curious combination brings us to Madballs in Babo: Invasion, a 3D action game digitally distributed via Steam. But as with any licensed title, it's not the license itself that matters, it's how the game plays. Thankfully Babo: Invasion turns out to be a rather fun title, packed with more modes of play than some full-price retail titles. The single player has a 10-level campaign featuring a story you don't have to worry about; it's not great, and besides, the main focus is the multiplayer. Here there's a range of modes you can play online. Co-op lets up to 4 of you tackle the main campaign together, which should makes things more interesting, but it's the Versus mode where the most fun in Babo: Invasion lies. The modes on offer include the standard deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture the flag, as well as two special gametypes; Invasion and Base Attack. The first sees two players designing their own maps to fight in by placing a combination of map tiles down before the match begins. The idea is to create a unique battleground each time, before heading off to take control of the opponent's base. Base Attack, meanwhile, is a new mode exclusive to the PC version. It takes that last part of the Invasion mode - taking control of the enemy base - and places it inside 12 of Playbrain's own maps. The effect is to give you the ability to learn and develop strategies for maps, and play more to the tactical side of the Invasion mode.

Babo: Invasion seems to have picked up an online following since it's launch on the Xbox Live Arcade and now on Steam. This has two positive effects; firstly you shouldn't struggle to find opponents for enjoyable multiplayer matches, and secondly the growing community is pushing the developer to support the game with updates. On top of support for Steam features like achievements, Steam Cloud (for sharing saves between machines), leaderboards and matchmaking, there's also been a raft of additions and changes. These includes 2 new weapons, UI changes, 5 new achievements, dedicated servers and much more. Playbrains' support has been admiral, and is certainly something to consider when you're looking to pick up a game like this.

We still haven't come to the important part; Babo: Invasion is, at heart, an arena shooter; your character rolls around the maps and you need to shoot the enemies. The Madballs themselves are somewhat ugly (and in toy form, squishy) balls that you navigate around the levels in a Marble Madness manner, being careful to avoid falling off certain edges. You control the character with either WSAD or the left stick on a game controller, with the Xbox 360 controller supported. The mouse or right stick, meanwhile, is used to control the direction the weapon fires, in the same way as a twin-stick shooter like Geometry Wars. It works well, and is enjoyable, but it's also this very nature which makes Babo: Invasion more suited to multiplayer. As mentioned before, the story isn't that great, the characters' voices can get annoying rather quickly due to the amount of repetition, and you can get a bit bogged down in fighting the same enemies over and over. In multiplayer none of this matters; your opponents vary, carry unique (though sometimes even more annoying) voices, and you can just enjoy the underlying mechanics of the game.

Babo: Invasion has been made to offer quite a large chunk of gameplay through repeated play. While it may not be the most enjoyable part of the game, going through singleplayer is one way to quickly unlock new weapons, weapon modes and abilities, as well as other Madballs characters. It is, however, also possible to gain these through time spent in multiplayer too. All the unlocks are particularly useful for playing online, where your unlocked content is carried over. Everything is also scored, with plenty of multipliers thrown in, and each level has it's own online leaderboards, again encouraging you to keep playing.

Babo: Invasion also looks quite nice visually for a cheaper indie title, with a range of bright colours on screen and particle effects to keep things looking vibrant. There's often lots of action displayed on-screen (particularly in multiplayer), and thankfully this doesn't disrupt an enjoyable game.

Ratings

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