Previous Next

Stormball is the latest in a long line of future sports games. You know the sort of thing - metallic-looking graphics, 'atmospheric' futuristic intro sequence, and a basic game that (stripped of all the frills) turns out to be something very simple indeed. Here it's Pong (you remember, the very first bat-and-ball computer game) that gets the treatment.

You play a chap standing on a floating disk in the middle of an aerna, and it's your job to bat the ball into the other half of the pitch, have it travel over some point-scoring squares, bounce off the far wall and hopefully travel back into your half, where you can collect it and try again.

The only problem is that the other guy's out to intercept the ball, and then do exactly the same to you.

Initially, the game looks very impressive. The pitch is a pretty 3D thing, viewed from just behind your little floating player. Points whizz up into the air coin-op style as you score them, there's an animated betting sequence before each game (you have to pay an 'entry fee' before you can challenge anyone, and it's only by gambling that you can earn enough money to take on the sport's more expensive star players) and there are various practice options allowing you to customise and save your own layout of playing pitch.

All well and good - the problems come once you start playing, when everything quite rapidly begins to make very little sense indeed. Since the walls to the oddly shaped courts you play on - located in the middle of a larger arena - are actually invisible, judging how the ball is going to bounce proves very difficult indeed. I'd just got to the stage where I'd got a vague idea of what was meant to be happening when - what's this? - the ball actually went right through one wall and continued across the arena floor for a bit (you could see its little shadow and everything). Hmm. Obviously these are 'elastic walls' - which bend when the ball hits them like the topes in a boxing ring or something - which complicates things further.

Add this confusion to the fact that it's very hard to see where the targets are - let alone keep track of the ball - and you get a game that looks good, but in play proves very off-putting indeed. Nothing about it made me want to persevere at all.

My recommendation? Scrap the pretty 3D, give us a simple top-down view, and you'd suddenly make it twice the game.

Pretty, but underneath lies a very simple game vastly over-complicated and made confusing to play. Yet another that would have benefitted from a proper thinking through before they started.