Simple to learn, hard to master. That’s the mantra behind all good puzzle games, where satisfaction is derived from the complete mastery of a simple toolset. Some games opt for a slow, thoughtful approach, where a solution is reached after a long consideration of the situation. Others opt for a more urgent approach, where solutions must be found quickly, all the while planning ahead for future developments.

Spinballs falls firmly into the latter category, tasking you with matching and removing coloured balls in order to increase your score and refill your ever-dropping timer. The balls are positioned in seven wheels of six, with each wheel rotatable: link three or more balls and they can be removed at will, causing any wheel affected to be removed and replaced with a new, random selection of balls. There are also four power-ups in the corners of the screen: any chains of balls touching a power-up invest it with energy when removed, and once a power-up has been charged enough it can be activated, granting more points, slowing down the timer, or helping to clear unhelpful wheels.

And that’s pretty much it. As points are accumulated, the game goes up in levels – this doesn’t result in a new screen to work through, it simply increases the speed of the timer, giving you less time to set up large runs of balls. At higher levels, you can only go a few rotations before the timer runs out, and as short runs barely refill the timer, this can result in a quick loss.

The game, then, can be a tense affair, as you rush to clear balls away and refill your timer, but it isn’t perfect. Though simple to learn, the game doesn’t encourage mastery in the same way that other puzzle games do. A large part of this is in the overly random nature of the ball replacement: with other puzzle games, learning to clear away parts of the screen while setting yourself up for future runs is important, but in Spinballs this isn’t something that can really be done: not only does the replacement of entire wheels, rather than just the affected balls, make planning near-pointless, but the fact that the game automatically selects which balls it will remove (always the largest set, randomly selected when there are several of the same size) removes one of the most important parts of any puzzle game: full agency over your own actions.

Add to this the lack of extra modes beyond a perfunctory no-fail mode (“Zen” mode), no online leaderboards, and the relatively high price, and this seems a bit of a missed opportunity. This is a capable enough puzzler, but there are far better titles out there.

Spinballs Gameplay Video

Spinballs Screenshots

Version Under Review : 1.5.0.0

Website : spinballs, Twitter : @christian_gross ; Facebook

There is a trial version available and the full version is available for $2.99, we are not sure what are the limitations of the trial version.

Our Rating for Spinballs

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