Hands-on | Madballs in… Babo: Invasion

Format: Xbox360 / PC | Genre: Action | Publisher: PlayBrain | Developer: PlayBrain | ETA: Summer 2009

By Christos Reid

Madballs in Babo: Invasion is possibly the biggest melting pot of ideas in a game to date, let alone something for the Xbox Live Arcade. But when you’re taking cues from so many different successful ideas, is there still room for originality?

To put it simply: yes, yes there is. Without a shred of doubt, Madballs is the best XBLA title I have ever played, and will probably stay that way until they release Half Life 3 on a Wednesday for 400 Microsoft Points. There are aspects of Quake, Geometry Wars, Ikaruga and even Marble Blast Ultra. Were you ever frustrated in Super Monkey Ball to the point where you wish you could’ve attached a minigun to your roll-cage and decimated the opposition? Well, this is exactly what developer Play Brains have gone for, and it’s paid off extremely well.

The amount of features is fairly overwhelming, as it seems to contain more campaign and multiplayer options than Halo 3, so longevity will never be a problem, especially if this game gets the ton of DLC that Play Brains head honcho Scott Simpson promised us during our play-through. There’s campaign, level attack, skirmish, invasion, and a ton of others to keep you happy for a long time, but what fascinated us from the get go was Avatar mode in multiplayer.

We kid you not, this game will decapitate your Avatar, attach a gun to their head, and allow you to go head to head with fifteen other similarly body-disadvantaged Xbox Live players in a free-for-all. With a three-second default respawn time and the interesting clipping effect of watching a cannon protrude from the middle of someone’s top-hat, only to see yourself decimated due to that moment of humorous distraction is something that really does make Kingdom for Keflings less of a game and more of an experiment to see what could be done.

//Roll with it
In the campaign, playable by yourself or with friends, you have the choice of playing as one of two factions – the Babo B*D*I forces, a blue-themed force of generic do-gooders, and the rockstar-cool evil Scorched lot. Each faction has a team of five soldier classes, each represented by a different character, and a leader whose appearance can be unlocked as a custom skin for one of the classes on the team. The class choices are logical, each simple variations on their health and speed stats. The “runner” class is extremely speedy, great for hit and run attacks, but getting hit back is probably going to be the end of your play session. On the other end of the scale, the “heavy” class is slow, but can take massive amounts of punishment.

Each character also comes with two special abilities, which are varied and always great to pull out in campaign, with a select few being geared towards wreaking utter chaos when playing online. Scott’s personal favourite was Scorcher heavy class character Magmor, who has both a “super-armoured-but-slow” ability, and also one that quadruples his size, instantly killing any enemy he touches for a short time. Great for tearing through crowds, and even better when you’re using it to kill rival journalists at CVG, OXM and GameSpot at the same time in an online play-testing session.

The story puts you on an unfamiliar world, inhabited by a mysterious third faction, hostile to both the B*D*I and Scorched, but for the sake of simplicity we’ll just call them “enemies,” as essentially that’s all they are. There’s a huge amount of variety in the enemies you’ll face, and what’s even more interesting is some of them will strongly resemble characters you may even be playing right that second. Clever, isn’t it? A quick re-skin and you’ve got a new character/enemy combination, and a back-story that involves defection from the enemy side. By far the most fun enemies to take on in

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