The Perplexing Orb: Bounce Mania

The Perplexing Orb: Bounce Mania is a platforming game indie from TreeFall games.  It shares a sub-genre with other rolling ball platformers like Trailblazer, Bouncer, Spindizzy and, if you want an example that isn’t from the ’80s, Super Monkey Ball.  It’s the fifth entry in a series of Perplexing Orb games with the previous four also being available on PSN.

This minimalist platformer sees you controlling a ball (or orb if you will) through forty levels (in the main campaign) in an effort to get to the finishing post of each level.  Along the way there are little tokens to pick up too.  But your main job is just to get through the levels.  There’s no plot to speak of or introductory sequences.  Instead you’re just left to get on with it but thankfully the game is very intuitive to pick up.  You control your ball with the left analogue stick (or the d-pad but that’s more sensitive and so we abandoned that after a couple of seconds of trying) and you can jump.  Beyond that, there are no additional controls.

Now, so far those first two paragraphs have been pretty much copied and pasted from our review of The Perplexing Orb: Bounce N’ Roll.  Why are we telling you that?  Because, The Perplexing Orb: Bounce Mania is also a cut-and-paste job and one that’s overplayed its hand and gotten a bit too obvious about it.  But unlike us, the developers aren’t telling you this.  So, I guess it’s up to us.

As with Bounce N’ Roll, you’re presented with a number of levels set across four environments.  These are the same desert, ice, city and dungeon stages as before.   The only difference, indeed the only meaningful difference at all, is that now you get fifty levels rather than forty.  They don’t even spread out the extra ten over the four environments and are instead all allocated to the desert section.

And when it comes to the levels themselves, they play just like the ones before.  There appears to be zero new mechanics or puzzles here.  It’s been a couple of years since we played Bounce Mania but this might as well be the same game.  These aren’t new levels.  Sure, they’re slightly different to before.  A turn placed here, a gap placed there.  It’s, at best, a remix.  But Bounce Mania offers you absolutely nothing new for your money.  Indeed, if it wasn’t for the fresh trophy set, you could easily just play Bounce N’ Roll and you’d have almost the exact same experience.

What might have made this all worth it would have been some attempt to at least fix the flaws with the previous titles.  The bowling ball physics, the drab visuals, the inability to quick restart on normal stages.  None of this has been addressed.  Indeed, the visuals are identical to Bounce N’ Roll.  In fact, why are the games even using the word ‘Bounce’ when aside from a few later levels, you don’t bounce at all?

But the main bugbear is that fixed camera that follows you at a set angle and cannot be rotated.  It’s almost inconceivable that they didn’t play around with that and try to improve things a little.  Even if they did just stick with these same level types, at least a bit of flexibility there, and a new coat of paint might have helped a little.  I mean, all these games just look like PS1 games anyway, so maybe the series is due a glow up.

Another legacy issue is how the game will still throw in a trickier level and then follow it up with a handful of super easy ones.  Indeed, we probably only failed two or three of the fifty stages at all.  And really it was only the last one that gave us any kind of challenge and that’s only because of how close together the obstacles are and how long the stage is.  Even then this was a game that we platinumed easily within an hour.  In fact, it’s arguably even easier than the previous game which, unfortunately, gives it even less longevity or value for money.  The extra ten stages will go by in mere minutes.

But with everything from the dated menu interface to pretty much every aspect of the game still staying the same, this feels like the developer spent an afternoon on it.  And, sure, it’s cheap, coming in at a fiver but this series is starting to feel like a rip off, even at that price.  At this point, this is close to feeling like any other asset-flip shovelware and that’s not why we got into reviewing games and surely not the reason we play them.