Before I even start this review, a warning to anyone expecting one of our normal reviews, this is going to get super nerdy real quick… If all you want is a quick digest, “SpeedBall! (by Lion Studios and MAUIGO) is a fast-paced avoider game for your iOS or Android device we are more than a little disappointed with.”
SpeedBall! is a game we think may symbolize just how good Ketchapp was at making great games. Whether you loved them or you hated them, Ketchapp games were generally fun-ish, (depending on what games you enjoyed playing on your mobile device), but what was most impressive of all was the level of quality Ketchapp managed to keep across almost all (we’d say 95%) of the games they published…
All this changed in 2018 with the rise of Voodoo and many other smaller publishers we see flooding the Apple Store and Google Play as well as Instagram in recent times.
MAUIGO Studios, formally one of the most commonly seen developers working alongside Ketchapp has published their first game with Lion Studios (that we are aware of) and the results are far less than what we had hoped for.
SpeedBall! looks like an under-polished Ketchapp game which was slapped together in 2 weeks before being shipped to consumers.
I know this is getting super nerdy, but the easiest way to see just how slapped together a game is is by looking at the Particle Effects (i.e. the little particle explosions you often see used in death animations, or throughout the entire game as is the case with SpeedBall!). If the particle effects being used are the default Unity 3D particle effects you can set up in virtually 30 seconds – simply drag and drop – then the game you are looking at is probably kind of cheap…
We could count at least 3 different places where the default Unity particle effects were being used in this game which is kind of depressing considering just how polished the games published by MAUIGO and Ketchapp were in the past.
Although this review turned into more of a rant than a review, it is sad to see the casual mobile gaming industry transform more and more into a marketing machine, moving further and further away from the fun and innovative industry we loved so much…
What is to come next? Only time will tell…
As a game SpeedBall! isn’t that bad of a title. Although we do strongly feel that it is a lot cheaper than what we were expecting, it is no better or worse than most other games that suddenly appear on the top 100 charts of the Apple App Store or Google Play. Although that isn’t necessarily a good thing…
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