Revenge of the Ball is an Xbox Live Indie game from Derrick Hopkins. After all these years of pong, the balls have apparently gotten armed with weapons and are out for revenge. The game is a simple twist on the old pong game type where instead of a second paddle, the balls occasionally pull out guns and start firing at you. This almost gives it a feel of a shoot ‘em up game with movement along a single axis. The controls feel great and you can use both joysticks and/or the d-pad in tandem for extra accuracy and speed. Unfortunately the gameplay is somewhat lacking. Even though the balls have evolved, you have not. When the balls start firing at you, you have no choice but to avoid and attempt to hit the other balls. If a ball intersects one that is firing, it simply goes straight through so you have no way to combat them. You just have to sit back and hope your screen doesn’t turn into a red strobe light (which it eventually will). After a couple levels, the chaos on screen is ridiculous. The plus side to this is that you won’t be playing for too long before you die and have to restart. Death is determined by a health meter at the top of the screen and you lose health for getting hit by bullets as well as balls getting past your paddle.

The background music is pure techno which can simultaneously get your heart pumping when things get chaotic but also can get annoying after a while. Which is fine, not every game soundtrack will appeal to everyone but there are no options. The only way to turn it off is to play music of your own or if you want no music, turn the volume on your song down to zero. There are local and global leaderboards but the global one doesn’t work. That is unless I am first in the world and it’s only player but I highly doubt that. In the end the concept could have gone further to add some more depth. Since that depth is not there, this will only appeal to people who love painfully challenging games.

Revenge of the Ball is like being put in front of a firing squad that’s firing at you while being asked to juggle balls. The difficulty ramps up to ridiculous levels so quickly that most people won’t get past the free trial time. After the first couple minutes the game devolves into such a chaotic mess that even a computer would have difficulty keeping up. While the unique twist is commendable, there really needs to be some more depth. The graphics have a nice retro style and the sounds are adequate. The techno background music is not for everyone though and can be a pain to turn off due to no native option. The cost of entry though is only a dollar (80ms points) so if you fancy a hard challenge, download the trial. If you’re man enough to conquer that and you’re still interested, dive in pong warrior.