Marcel! Stop it, Marcel! Bad monkey!
When you first pick up Zoomaroom and start flailing that monkey marble around, alternately wildly overshooting and falling woefully short of your targets, caroming off of obstacles and slingshotting from lines between blocks for no distinguishable reason, you may feel some aversion to continuing the experience.
When you crumple into a corner with coins hung far above your jumping reach and a note telling you you can always come back for them when you get a little better, you may wonder if telepathic mastery over all energies in the physical universe is their idea of “a little better”.
When you are expected to walk backwards along a ball that you haven’t even managed to land on accurately after a dozen attempts in order to coax it into rolling across a lake of lava with you astride, you may shout, “Expletive this!” and turn the game off.
And who could blame you? But…
If you have the patience to grapple with that slippery mountebank and force him down the straight and narrow, requiring hardcore skills even beyond an n+ due to the loose controls, you will find a worthy platforming experience in plentiful amounts.
Gadgets, unlockables, a level builder, and level exchanging with other players further sweeten the deal to nigh irresistability.
Y’know, unless you just can’t play the blasted thing.
200 Points gets you a whole lot of something.
This title was 200 Points at the time of writing this review but has since been reduced to 80 Points.
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Yeah, I couldn’t play it. I quit at the exact same spot, when I had to ride that green ball. I don’t get why the character controls like a car in cruise mode. It just feels awkward. Everything else for hours of fun is there, but the controls need additional work.
Yeah same here Pandapadawan. I played the demo 3 times and the handling still didn’t click with me. Not helped by the near vertical difficulty curve after the first couple of levels mind.
I admit I’m crap at this sort of game, so it’s a shame it didn’t have a few easier levels to make it more accessible for the non-masochists among us as technically it’s great.
I was eventually able to feel in control, but I shudder to think of the expectations of the harder levels.
One tip: only tap and release jump. Holding it makes you go spastic if you touch anything.
Hi I’m one of the developers of Zoomaroom. I like this review because it gives us good feedback for making the game better.
After playing the game for 6mo it’s hard for us to tell what’s easy & what’s hard. In our next update to the game we’re going to re-arrange the rooms to move the dreaded ball rolling room later in the game. We’re told subsequent rooms are easier, so that should help the ramp-up curve.
The controls are very much like Marble Blast Ultra. You are effectively a rolling ball and pressing left-right adds a torque to the ball (spins it). The monkey “costume” doesn’t change the way the ball rolls.
Another tip: if you have trouble with a room, press Start -> Choose Room -> Game Rooms -> Next Room. You dont have to beat the room to move on, although you need to average 3 coins per room to continue unlocking room ‘tiers’.
-Brandon
I actually bought it and made it to the beginner 3 tier so far. If you think of the game as a physics based 2D Marble Blast Ultra the controls make sense. However I still believe it would work much better if you had direct control over the ball. The most annoying part so far wasn’t the green ball but the long platform section above the waterfall. Please think about an alternate control scheme where you control the ball directly. No stick movement = no movement at all, stick all the way to the left/right = maximum speed and something in between.
In hindsight, you’re right about the controls. We modeled them directly off of MBU, but the game evolved to become quite different. Once we had more than a few rooms changing the controls became infeasible.
This is a hobby project and game development isn’t our day jobs, so we’ve still got a lot to learn. When you compare it to other games at the same price we still think we provide a lot of game for the $.
I LOVE the physics based controls. LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT.
LOVE LOVE LOVE ok you get my drift. Seriously, the physics based controls take a while to get used to, but is a hundred times more rewarding than a straightforward platformer with their restricted physics rules.
Nearly everything about this game is great IMO. From the controls, to the level design, to the method in which you progress, to the placement of the coins (some take some skill and is rewarding), to the level editor.
The only “complaint” I could have is with the same music looping, but it’s understandable as MS would have forced you to charge 400 pts for something over 50Mbs, so it’s not really a complaint. Some of the art is pretty basic though, but it’s consistent and that’s what matters most.
BTW I’m a huge Sonic fan, which explains why I do like the physics. Sonic physics were pushing traditional platformers to the limit because he controlled very much like a pinball. They did tone down his pinball-ness though, and I do suppose that helped make it more accessible to gamers of all types.
At first, I thought that part was incredibly hard, but what you need to do is get the ball rolling, wait for it to get midway through, then jump to the other side. It’s actually fairly easy. Anyhow, I kinda enjoyed the trial. The ultra slippery controls really need to be fixed though.
Yeah same here Facemeat, I was just about to throw in the towel at that bit then I worked out an easy as solution of just working from right to left at normal pace then left to right really slowly so the monkey wouldn’t affect the big ball then repeating the process until I was there, very easy once you suss it.
This game is an absolute STEAL at 200 points, huge fan.
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Strangely, I don’t care that much that this is physics-based as opposed to ordinary platformer controls. I like big, appealing, well-designed platformer levels, and this has a ton of them
Oh, but yup, the controls did take a while to get used to.