Kid Ball Adventure

There is absolutely no reason to hiss or tail like the cat around hot porridge. Kid Ball Adventure is an infantile sloppy and downright unnecessary game, a series of repetitions without an engaging story, attractive design or a hint of innovation as far as the eye can see. A charmless copy of far better games with no aspiration to neither surprise nor impress. In short, the simplest of ideas in extremely rudimentary execution. One hundred levels filled with platforming await you and in the role of the titular Kid Ball, your goal is to navigate around all the obstacles to get from point a to point b. It doesn’t get more exciting than that.

If the concept is recognisable, it is not particularly strange. The entire gameplay is straight out stolen from Super Meat Boy or any of the hundreds of clones that followed in its success. So if you’ve played any of them, then the mechanics in Kid Ball Adventure will feel very familiar. Albeit with small, marginal differences. Avoid the traps, find the key that unlocks the exit and advance to the next level. It doesn’t get much more advanced than that, for better or for worse. And as usual in this type of game, your own patience is often your worst enemy, even though there are no time limits in Kid Ball Adventure (provided you don’t choose to engage in time trial mode that is).

Unlike many of its predecessors, failure is actually punished a little more severely in Kid Ball Adventure. Not only do you have to start over at the beginning of the course, you also lose a life. If you’re unlucky enough to use up all of these, you’re not only forced to start over from the beginning of the course, but from the game’s last autosave. Something that happens every fifth level, and this particular part of Kid Ball Adventure was something I found really frustrating. No one appreciates being forced to replay several courses that you have already completed and in such a repetitive game as this you just get even more pissed off. It will be like pouring salt into an open wound, something that makes no one happy.

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No Kid Ball Adventure will not win any awards in innovation. No new ground is broken here and the added value of replaying the adventure once you’ve rescued your abducted girlfriend (who is also a ball) is zero. Sure, it offers a simple game mode of racing against the clock or surviving as long as possible on one life, but you can forget about any rewards or secrets to unlock. There are no treasures to be found at the end of the rainbow here. Only one hundred levels of slowly increasing difficulty with occasional boss monsters to defeat to break up the boredom. Monotonous is just the first name and as unexciting as boiled pasta with ketchup.

However, Kid Ball Adventure is not completely hopeless. To its advantage, it must be mentioned that the controls are functional and responsive in each case. There’s a good feel to Kid Ball’s “bounce” when he jumps and likewise the challenge is fairly well balanced and unlike its (much better) predecessors, Kid Ball Adventure is unlikely to make you wildly throw your controller into the stratosphere of frustration. No, the risk is far greater that you will fall asleep out of pure boredom, something I myself came close to doing several times on the sofa. Kid Ball Adventure is what I would like to call the definition of an unnecessary game, cheap shovelware. It is unbearably ugly, simplistic and completely without any identity of its own. Save your money, stay away.

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