Road to Ballhalla is a simple top-down arcade-style game. You control a ball, and your goal is to navigate your way through 20 levels, collecting little sparks (the game’s collectable) and avoiding dying as you go.
The game is very simple – there isn’t even a jump button. You can simply move in any direction, or speed up your rolling in a sort of dash move. The dash move makes it so you die instantly if you take damage, rather than simply… well, taking damage. This makes it risky to use at times, so it must be used judiciously.
The levels themselves present virtually all of the game’s mechanics. Each level has its own set of unique mechanics, and only a relatively small number of them recur – and those which do generally show up no more than twice, save for the most simple of things (jump pads, laser beams, switches, bullets, damaging patches of ground, ground sections which kill you unless you have picked up blue “keys” to roll over them with, which each deactivate one such spot).
However, the game still has a pretty broad variety of levels. One level sees you constantly phasing in and out of reality, allowing you to pass through/over deadly ground without being harmed. Another has the ball “hiccupping”, launching the ball in the direction of travel through the air every time, allowing you to clear gaps which you could not otherwise clear. Another level has a rhythmic bouncing which keeps sending you up in the air, a much more controllable thing than the hiccups – but you have to do much finer manipulation with it. That level also has a laser beam from the sky that damages you for 10% of your health every few seconds, limiting the time you can spend boosting as well as forcing you to get through the level within a short period of time (and avoid taking other damage). Other levels distort the view of the camera, require you to solve puzzles, require you to bounce over pits using launch pads, use a gigantic ball which keeps trying to crush you to deactivate lasers and trigger switches, and a variety of other mechanics.
The game feels like it is of the right length; if it was longer, it would probably get repetitive. But at 20 (fairly difficult) levels, it feels just about right. For added challenges, you can speed run the levels, which unlocks additional skins for your balls as well as various secrets. There’s also a scavenger hunt which requires you to use clues from the scavenger hunt area and then go into the various levels and hunt down secret areas, activating purple portals which give you directions so you can solve a puzzle where you’re running your ball over invisible blocks.
The game also has a narrator of sorts. The narrator doesn’t talk, but he leaves messages in the levels for you. Some of the messages change as you progress through the levels; others appear when you meet certain conditions. The narrator not only explains mechanics (often in a roundabout way), they also taunt the player, crack jokes, make endless ball puns (indeed, virtually every name in the game is based around ball puns of one kind or another), and sometimes try and get the player to kill themselves (including in one level where a new deadly mechanic is introduced and the narrator tempts the player into killing themselves repeatedly by making false claims about how it works).
The game has tons of checkpoints, so getting through the levels is not an impossible task even for a fairly mediocre player. However, if you want to get all the secrets, you’re going to need to collect every collectable spark in every level, and do it without dying – as well as speed run the levels. These optional challenges are much more, well, challenging, and combined with the secret areas from the treasure hunt provide a second, higher level of challenge for the player who wants to do more than merely progress.
All in all, beating the game is likely to only take a few hours, but 100%ing it is likely to take 12 hours or so.
If you’re looking for a fairly simple but challenging arcade-style top-down navigation game, this is actually pretty decent. The graphics are clean, there’s a bit of humor in it, and the gameplay is challenging but generally enjoyable.
Just be aware that this is a very simple game which is very mechanically oriented and a fairly high difficulty level – there is no real story, just a series of well-designed mechanical challenges.
3.5