Quick Review: Marble Mayhem: Fragile Ball

There's fragile, then there's this.

Developed by Bimboosoft Co., Ltd and published by Senpai Studios, Marble Mayhem: Fragile Ball was released on July 7th, 2015. The concept is as simple as it gets: You control a little ball and must get from its starting point to the exit of the level. All this, through 100 levels that evolve to include moving platforms, traps, and the ever-present deadly spikes.

Of course it starts easy.
It picks up fast enough into an insane difficulty.

See that part in the title? “Fragile Ball”? Yeah, that’s in there for a reason. The ball is made of glass, I guess? We’re far from the steel balls rolling around tilt mazes. This ball will break if it lands on a surface from too high, if it hits spikes (though that’s normal)… It might break even if you’ve had it rolling around a little too fast and it hits a wall. You could look at this ball wrong and it would break itself in fear. Oh sure, sometimes you’re given a “Super” bouncy ball that can’t break from falling – it’ll still explode upon landing on spikes. And levels with bouncy balls are covered in spikes at all of the worst possible places.

Nonononono not the spikes! Not the spikes! God damn it,
bouncy ball, why are you so impossible to control?

Whoa! Where's the exit?

The level is tilted by moving the mouse left and right. Several levels have a limit, AKA you can only spin them up to a certain degree. If you could skip the difficult parts, what would be the point? There are, however, levels that can be flipped around all 360 degrees, and some of them are so big that you can’t even see the exit from where the ball spawns. It’s possible to roll the mouse wheel to zoom in and out of those levels, and it’s also possible to instantly restart a level by clicking the left button.

No- No- NO! Dammit, I was on the moving platform!

Oh, but wait – that’s before the game introduces moving platforms, on which you must carefully control the ball so it won’t fall off those platforms. It feels like you will lose if you move the mouse left or right even a hundredth of an inch. Needless to say, the difficulty here is above and beyond. The first few levels are easy enough, but it soon gets insane. This game requires more patience than I have, I swear. I gave up around the twentieth level. Thankfully, many levels, when beaten, unlock more than one new level to try out, so you’re rarely stuck in a level until you manage to beat it – but I’d assume you need to beat most of them to unlock everything.

The graphics aren’t very notable, and the music is kind of passable – it’s however likely to become very annoying when heard on a loop due to particularly tough challenges.

Overall, not a great experience. I don’t really recommend it. Still, it’s out there for about a dollar if you wish to try it, but there’s much better and much more engaging games of that type out there.