Iggy's Reckin' Balls

Summary

Genre: Racing
Number of players: 1-4
Rumble Pak: No
Controller Pak: Yes
Expansion Pak: Not used

Review

Well, with a cheesy title like "Reckin' Balls", it's highly unlikely that all that many people own this very peculiar racing game, which features a set of balls who must make their way to the top of a number of tower-like racecourses, armed only with a long, thin grapple. Not exactly a well-known game - but does this mean it's not worth picking up?


Gameplay: The game premise is truly original. You can choose from an assortment of balls, such as the eponymous Iggy, a robotic ball called 'ROB' and a glowing sun called 'Sonny'. Clearly, much thought went into the names. In any event, each ball has different attributes of speed, acceleration, and so on. All of the characters are equipped with a grapple, which is used as both a weapon and an essential climbing tool.

The courses are laid out as a series of tracks, stacked on top of and around each other. The balls roll along the tracks, and can grapple to a higher track if it's close enough. Performing this grappling is quite simple at first, but it's not long before a lot of dexterity is required, with much swinging from track to track, and eventually the need to lower yourself from the track, swing from side to side and eventually shoot yourself into the air to reach much higher tracks.

The grapple can also be used to attack other players, and there are several ways to do this. Simply touching an opponent with the grapple grabs them and swings them behind you, stunning them for a moment. If you move the control stick left and right with perfect timing after grappling them, you can smash them through the track and knock them downwards. Finally, if you push the control stick up and then spin it around, you can fling them sideways off the track, losing them loads of time as they hurtle downwards waiting for the dragonfly, who flies in to save any player who falls off the edge, to come and rescue them. Another useful trick is to jump on top of an opponent to give yourself a boost upwards while temporarily squashing them. Combat can be fun, although it's usually a rather one-sided affair.

A few other things crop up in some of the courses, such as 'bumpers' which fling your ball upwards a huge distance; icy, slimy and concrete tracks which have varying effects on movement; a variety of enemies who try and attack you or push you away; and speed strips which make you roll at turbo speed for quite a while. Suffice to say that racing can be a highly varied experience.

Varied it may be, and definitely original as it is, is it fun? Overall, yes, it is rather enjoyable - but it can be intensely frustrating! 'Missing' a moving platform, or failing a difficult swing jump can be most annoying, to say nothing of inadvertantly falling down off a high platform onto one much lower that you spent the last couple of minutes getting off. However, this is really a necessary consequence of the unique gameplay style, and there isn't really much that could have been done to change these annoyances. But they're still annoying.

Nonetheless, the game can be good fun to play, and is hugely original.


Challenge: There are ten distinct championships to race over, with a total of ten levels in each championship, giving a total of 100 different racetracks, which is a lot. The computer opponents range from easy to nightmarishly hard, requiring loads of skill and shortcut-taking to beat. Suffice to say that the game is very tough to beat, and there's loads to do. In addition, there are ten battle arenas for the special 'battle mode', which works very similarly to the Mario Kart one, to be unlocked, as well as a large number of secret characters, too. Overall, the game should keep you going for ages, as long as you don't get infuriated with it.


Graphics: The graphics are okay, but there's not very much that's outstanding in any way. There's enough variety between different areas, and enough detail, to keep the game visually interesting, but again, nothing that really stands out.


Sounds: The aural aspects of the game are fine, too, although occasionally they can be annoying, particularly some of the voice samples. Iggy himself makes you want to grab him by the neck and shake him, at least if he had a neck, due to his accursed 'surfer dude' accent. Grrrrrargh! The music is alright, but not brilliant at all, and in places repetitive.


Multiplayer: Multiplayer can actually be most enjoyable to play, certainly more than single-player. Combat is also more fun when it's a human opponent you're slinging from the track, and when similarly-skilled players go head-to-head, the competition is intense. However, if some players are better than others, multiplayer tends to be very flat and one-sided, and there's no handicap option as in several other racers. Also, the fact that you can only play multiplayer over the course of an entire 10-race championship is really annoying, and the lack of an option to play a single race is a surprising and unfortunate omission.


Summing up: A novel, and reasonably fun premise, with a huge amount of racecourses and quite a lot of variety. Graphics and sound are average, and multiplayer is enjoyable, albeit flawed in some respects. The game has quite a lot going for it, but, as with Glover, it's not for the easily-frustrated.


Gamesmark: 73%


Reviewer: Maverik



Tangycheese's opinion: Ooh, I hated this game. Mav of course would put it down to me being "easily frustrated". Not so. The game just doesn't play very well at all. The sounds are deeply annoying, and the multiplayer just isn't fun. And the battle mode isn't even worthy of a mention. Sure, it's a novel idea, but it's not well done, and it's not a good way to spend your money. Want racing? Buy F-Zero X. Want battles? Buy Mario Kart. But DON'T buy Iggy's Reckin' Balls. And who came up with that name, anyway?