What could've been a competent Monkey Ball clone with a cute art style and catchy stage tunes suffers from some terrible design decisions and a major design flaw -- additive diagonal movement speed (the sort of thing you'd expect from an old FPS game, not a physics-based precision-platformer). What this means is that if you simultaneously hold both forward and left or right (and moreso if you turn the camera sideways), you will move faster than if you held just forward by itself. This quirk has caused me to over-correct my movement and fall off the courses far too many times.

Now, I consider myself a Monkey Ball expert (I've 100% cleared Banana Mania for instance), but some of the levels in this game feel like you can only clear them if you're lucky, not if you're skilled. Dishonourable mentions go to Gables (a level designed around climbing and descending steep slopes), Razor Blades (traversing gradually thinner and steeper jagged platform rings where you'll likely bump and fall off), and Serial Jumps (a downhill ramp where you can and will bounce over the jumps through no fault of your own due to the game's physics). Oh yeah, and if you want to play the game's "Encore" stages, you need to go through an entire set without failing too many times, and those three stages I mentioned are all in the same "Expert" category. Good thing there's an exploit to bypass that requirement, or else I would've never seen said stages (and this is coming from someone who completed Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania's marathon mode while losing less than 100 lives!).

And then there's the torture that is getting "Platinum" times in Medal Mode (a mode dedicated around speedrunning the individual stages which has most of the game's achievements). So you know that diagonal movement flaw I mentioned? That is MANDATORY for most of them, and the times seem to be set with that in mind. If the required times for those were even just a quarter-second longer, that would alleviate most of my frustrations, but the way they're implemented practically requires TAS-level frame-perfect precision to obtain. I hope you enjoy constantly pause-buffering! The worst offenders were 5-2 Swinging Platforms, 7-3 Rooftop Ramps, 10-8 Vanishing Road, 11-2 Variable Size, and B-4 Double Loop, which all took me hours and hundreds of attempts before succeeding, with most of the other stages in the same tiers taking roughly a tenth of the time in comparison. And no, the reward you get for completing the game's hardest stages (Champion Encore) won't even help you get a good chunk of those.

And finally there's another elephant in the room for completionists, the "Fallout Royale" achievement. If there was ever something in a game that was such a blatant disrespect of the player's time, it'd be that achievement for... resetting a level 76,000 times. For the record, once I finally achieved every last Platinum Medal in the game, my total reset count was 7,011, which wasn't even enough for the preceding achievement which required 10,000 resets! Cue me setting up a macro to constantly restart for the next TWENTY HOURS (2/5ths of my total playtime!). I don't know who thought this was a good idea, those should've been a tenth of the required amounts for them to actually be achievable naturally. I'd be bored out of my mind if I wasn't watching livestreams the entire time...

Now, I get it. Making games is hard, especially if you're a small team of less than 10 people like with Paperball here. But some of these issues could have easily been avoided if the developers showed some restraint. For that, this game gets a D-. See me after class, Coco.

What could've been a competent Monkey Ball clone with a cute art style and catchy stage tunes suffers from some terrible design decisions and a major design flaw -- additive diagonal movement speed (the sort of thing you'd expect from an old FPS game, not a physics-based precision-platformer). What this means is that if you simultaneously hold both forward and left or right (and moreso if you turn the camera sideways), you will move faster than if you held just forward by itself. This quirk has caused me to over-correct my movement and fall off the courses far too many times. Now, I consider myself a Monkey Ball expert (I've 100% cleared Banana Mania for instance), but some of the levels in this game feel like you can only clear them if you're lucky, not if you're skilled. Dishonourable mentions go to Gables (a level designed around climbing and descending steep slopes), Razor Blades (traversing gradually thinner and steeper jagged platform rings where you'll likely bump and fall off), and Serial Jumps (a downhill ramp where you can and will bounce over the jumps through no fault of your own due to the game's physics). Oh yeah, and if you want to play the game's "Encore" stages, you need to go through an entire set without failing too many times, and those three stages I mentioned are all in the same "Expert" category. Good thing there's an exploit to bypass that requirement, or else I would've never seen said stages (and this is coming from someone who completed Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania's marathon mode while losing less than 100 lives!). And then there's the torture that is getting "Platinum" times in Medal Mode (a mode dedicated around speedrunning the individual stages which has most of the game's achievements). So you know that diagonal movement flaw I mentioned? That is MANDATORY for most of them, and the times seem to be set with that in mind. If the required times for those were even just a quarter-second longer, that would alleviate most of my frustrations, but the way they're implemented practically requires TAS-level frame-perfect precision to obtain. I hope you enjoy constantly pause-buffering! The worst offenders were 5-2 Swinging Platforms, 7-3 Rooftop Ramps, 10-8 Vanishing Road, 11-2 Variable Size, and B-4 Double Loop, which all took me hours and hundreds of attempts before succeeding, with most of the other stages in the same tiers taking roughly a tenth of the time in comparison. And no, the reward you get for completing the game's hardest stages (Champion Encore) won't even help you get a good chunk of those. And finally there's another elephant in the room for completionists, the "Fallout Royale" achievement. If there was ever something in a game that was such a blatant disrespect of the player's time, it'd be that achievement for... resetting a level 76,000 times. For the record, once I finally achieved every last Platinum Medal in the game, my total reset count was 7,011, which wasn't even enough for the preceding achievement which required 10,000 resets! Cue me setting up a macro to constantly restart for the next TWENTY HOURS (2/5ths of my total playtime!). I don't know who thought this was a good idea, those should've been a tenth of the required amounts for them to actually be achievable naturally. I'd be bored out of my mind if I wasn't watching livestreams the entire time... Now, I get it. Making games is hard, especially if you're a small team of less than 10 people like with Paperball here. But some of these issues could have easily been avoided if the developers showed some restraint. For that, this game gets a D-. See me after class, Coco.