Switchball review

Oct 16, 2007

You: a sentient marble, lonely in a world of physics. Them: magnets, air currents, ropes, cloth, cannons, helium, friction, spikes, whirling machinery and your ultimate nemesis, gravity. Your only ally as you wildly swish the mouse to roll drunkenly over Switchball's precariously floating levels is yourself, or specifically, other versions of yourself. Your ball, you see, can be switched.

Become Metal, of the family Ball. He's big and slow to get up to speed, but a heart of cold iron makes him ideal for bashing things out of the way. His nemesis is the electromagnet; that irresistible siren absolutely must be shut off before you stray anywhere near it in this form.

Air Ball is bigger still, but pink, fun and ineffectual. His party trick is to get (physically) high on helium to access lofty areas. Likes: air currents, a little too much. Hates: spikes - they're so working class. For the first half of the game that's all Switchball's ball-switching is: you can be small and normal, big and hard or big and light. But it gets extraordinary mileage out of it simply by being terribly good-looking and deliciously clever.