Hands-on | Madballs in… Babo: Invasion

their base to be, and the most votes decides where it goes for each team. You also get to choose nodes, the number depending on the number of players. With nodes being able to upgrade to anything from health regeneration towers to rocket turrets, they’re a valuable commodity, and something you’ll need if you don’t want the other team to win. They also provide your own base with a force field, and it can’t be damaged while at least one node is in your control.

This is where the deep strategy of invasion mode comes into play. In order to win, you need to destroy the opposing team’s base. To do so, you must not only take their nodes, but lock them out of them using turrets, then take on their base. Their base is also able to attack you, and in a game with infinite ammunition (as with most arcade shooters) this can prove to be a problem as you’re never going to deplete the stocks of the besieged building. Out goes your teachings by Sun Tzu, and in comes headset tactics. Stealth is key in this map, as charge into an area the enemy has built up with walls and bridges, not to mention rocket-turret nodes, and you’re in for a slow, painful retreat.

However, sneak in, perhaps using Babo team’s Eidolon character’s ghost ability (read: cloaking device), and wait just out of the firing range of their base, and they’ll have no idea where you came from when your team-mates take down their base’s shield, with you throwing rockets at it the second the electric armour fails. It’s an arena shooter mode that requires a lot more thinking than the average capture-the-flag affair, and takes your RTS skills to ask just as much as the ability to shoot.

//Rolling down the road
With so many features, is there anything else to mention? Sure. Level attack. When you’re done with campaign, you can go back and start hunting for everything from high scores, to tight times and “secrets” – snippets of humorous anecdotal storyline that Scott labels as “dumb” in a good way, but most players will simply find charming. In order to rack up a high score, however, you’re going to need a lot of multipliers. These drop as simple glowing “X” icons from dead enemies, but bear in mind in order to get them, you’re going to need to kill that enemy with the correct ammunition. Gotcha. Just when you thought this game was simple.

The multipliers will come in handy though, and seeing them racked up as high as 70, it’s no surprise to find there’s also a stunning total of 56 leaderboards to compete with people globally in. Expect to see some ridiculous scores pop up on the board a few weeks into release, and you’ll be happy to know that we’ll be on every single one of them. The game is an arcade title for a reason: people enjoy arcade shooters, and even if you’re not into the isometric-esque viewpoint that Madballs offers, this isn’t a problem. A short button press later, you’re staring at the entire game top-down, and this can be done both in single and in multiplayer, a feature which really puts poorly considered viewpoint changes such as Bethesda’s Fallout 3 to shame in terms of camera-based playing styles for different people.

With all of this from an XBLA dual-stick shooter, you’re probably wondering why it’s not a full-price, thousand achievement-point Xbox 360 title. With not only this many gameplay features, but some very swish graphics that would take another page to cover, the answer is that we don’t really know either. It’s a shooter that takes the best elements from every arcade ‘shmup before it, and adds a ton of originality on top. In the first paragraph we asked if it was possible to still have a refreshing, original gaming experience with a game that took from so many other titles and melded their ISPs into one game. The answer is yes, and whether it debuts for 800, 1200 or even 1600 points, this game will almost certainly be worth your money.

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