Switchball review

Well, good-looking and good-feeling - the rolling and bumping and knocking and flinging are all exquisitely well done. And physics, the best thing to happen to games since explosive barrels, has a way of making you care. Twice now Switchball has made someone passing the desk say "Oh no!" as they see we're about to screw up. There's something immediately intriguing about the little rock clanging around rails and tubes; and a fatal swerve elicits a gasp of dismay in a way that hitting zero health in an FPS doesn't.

The cleverness is stable, and a constant source of satisfaction. Every one of its 30 levels has a string of "Ahhh!" moments, after which you smile at the neatness and logic of the solution you've devised. Nudging dangling steel blocks as the metal ball, in order to hook them behind railings and keep them out of the way for your smaller self to pass by later, floating to a high ledge as the Air Ball to nudge an electromagnet down so that you can swing from it Tarzan-style in another mode; firing endless cannonballs at a critical crate to knock it down to where you need it, only to find it's blasted off the edge of the map each time, until you realise you need to fire yourself to strike it just right.

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It doesn't run out of brains, but in later chapters it does succumb to that misguided urge to crank up the pressure. This goes badly. Switchball is a thoughtful puzzle game, but neither its camera nor controls are up to the dexterity-driven tasks it sets here. You gain a fourth ball that can have one of three manually-activated abilities: jump, speed or electromagnetism. These have roles in some lovely puzzles, but toward the end they're required for tricky jumps, precision balancing and luck-based fiddlery.