Posted by Ryan Johnson on 05 6, 2010

Mad O Ball 3D

Categories: Games, | 0 comments | |

3D graphics, flawless use of the iPhone / iPod touch accelerometer, perfectly matched music and sound effects, 32 superbly crafted tracks, and 4 different worlds. What’s not to love! Mad O Ball 3D is a flat out awesome game! Reminiscent of the calibration and tilt sensitive controls first introduced by Super Monkey Ball, Mad O Ball 3D is a game all about guiding a faceless yet personality filled ball through a variety of worlds and challenging tracks. It’s your job to guide your Mad O Ball through ever changing, windy, hilly, and jump filled tracks safely to the end and as fast as possible. Mad O Ball isn’t just a challenge to complete each level, but it’s a race. The fastest times earn international bragging rights and unlock more and more levels and slow times earn you a trip back to the starting line. Keeping up with the lightning fast folks sitting atop the global leaderboard is no simple task. Do you have what it takes to reign supreme?

The brain child of Tommaso Lintrami, Mad O Ball 3D is a clever blend of familiar ball game style and function with a new level of quality, features, and situations. The game’s controls feel extremely natural and are precisely responsive. Tilt your iPhone / iPod touch in the appropriate direction guide your Mad O Ball toward the finish. Throughout the way you’ll be faced with varying degrees of sharp turns, steep hills, barriered and barrierless walls, and open gaps and ramps that you need to jump. Prior to turns, gaps, and hills Mad O Ball 3D provides you with a small prompt to prepare you for what’s ahead. Your ability to decifer what’s next and to quickly adjust your technique on the fly will determine how far and fast you travel.

Baked into the game are a few extras to help you complete tracks and achieve better times. Key milestones within each level are marked with checkpoints so if you happen to fall off the track at any point after reaching the checkpoint you start from there instead of at the beginning which is nice. Also, there are little clocks sprinkled intermittently, often in tricky areas, that when gathered subtract seconds from your time. In many cases you’ll need to jump to reach the clocks, so be careful. Sometimes clocks are located right before sharp bends, gaps, or some other form of challenge so it’s easy to fall off the track in the quest to subtract valuable time.

Overall I love Mad O Ball 3D. Maybe it’s my long lived love of tilt controlled ball games that started with Super Monkey Ball or maybe it’s just the smooth and addictive nature of the game. I don’t know. All I know is that I enjoy the double edged challenge of completing levels in an effort to conquer all 32 tracks and the pride that comes with giving the rest of the Mad O Ball 3D universe a run for their money. Albeit my current times are well below the kingpins that’re currently dominating the leaderboard, but I sure as heck plan on giving them something to talk about real soon!

As mentioned I loved everything about the game. The graphics, sounds, controls, tracks, levels, all of it. However if I were to pick on one area of the app it’d be it’s interface. It’s super plane looking compared to the actual levels. I think when people first open the app they’ll probably think it’s not that money. I’d love to see the pre-game screens jazzed up a bit to better match the in-game quality and graphics. Aside from that minor nit pick I’d say it’s all good and 100% worth the download! For those of you that are more test drive before you buy people, do yourself a favor and go download the free scaled down version Mad O Ball 3D Lite to see what it’s all about. If you’re a fan of tilt control ball games then you’re going to love Mad O Ball 3D!

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