AchBall Reviews

Simple and clever and pain-free. I've never played pachinko, but if I had, this would put me in mind of its hypnotizing rhythm of shoot, watch, repeat.

This is exactly what it looks like. The bouncing has a satisfying little sound to it and the gameplay is simple and fun. I got it because I thought it might be suitable while listening to podcasts and audiobooks. The main improvements I'd like to suggest are: (1) the ability to use the mouse to aim and fire the ball; (2) a way to jump to specific levels; (3) repeating the level by default instead of advancing.

Achball's only flaw is that it's too short. The game is amazing otherwise. Please play it it's so good.

Easy to pick up and quick to complete, hard to master. Fun little puzzle game.

AchBall is a very simple "physics" based puzzle game where you plan the trajectory of a "ball" and aim to hit the exit zone. There's a number of obstacles and hazards in each level that add challenge, and there's a score based on how many times you bounce the ball. When I say "simple", I was being kind... this is dumbed down to the extreme, but that's to be expected from Russian shovelware/minimum viable products like this. Think of this as Angry Birds, but without the cute birds, and with physics so dumbed down the developer couldn't work out how to add "force" as a feature, so your ball always shoots off with the same level of energy. Or like Pong, but without multiplayer. Or like Breakout, but without the bricks. That's how incredibly dumbed down this is. For fans of symmetry, the quality of the implementation is perfectly on par with the game design and concept... a complete, lazy shambles. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. The game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio. It's possible they developed this using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game has been specifically designed for people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers. This has a lot of qualities that you would expect from a mobile app, but I wasn't able to find it on the app stores. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all). Regardless, for all intents and purposes "AchBall" might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 4 players. That's right, only 4. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is to be expected. Gamers just didn't take this low quality game seriously, and for good reason. Like, this is so bad, even though it has achievements, it didn't appeal to achievement hunters! At least the dev couldn't work out how to do trading cards, or this thing would have thousands of concurrent gamers idling the cards and making it harder to work out if it was actually popular or just exists because of the cards. AchBall is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. Because this is the kind of game you can just play for free on mobile phones, it's impossible to recommend anyone should pay money for the same experience on Steam.

Game is under one dollar normally and .49 cents on sale. The game has achievements as well as controller support but the best part about the game besides the tight controls and addicting gameplay is that each of the 80 levels have leaderboards and rankings so you can see how well you stack up against the best in the world that have played the game. At the current price the game is a steal and i would highly recommend it to any serious or casual gamer whether you have a few minutes of time to spend or hours this game is very entertaining and has high replayability. Buy It Now, you won't regret it!

It's not worth 0.99 cents; it's worth 0.49 cents. The game is quick, easy to beat, lack mechanics, simple okay music. The game is annoying than difficult which has a few mechanics and mechanics that would've been great to see in more levels and some levels you can just skip the mechanics and easily to shoot the ball into the goal. Places where you just press the space bar and then you don't even need to do anything to get 0 points on certain levels.

A really nice ricochet-style indie game that doesn't take that long to complete. The goal is very simple. Just slingshot your ball-like thing into the swirling black abyss and the more times your ball hits against the walls, the more points you get, at the cost of losing momentum/speed. I found the levels where you were floating in midair and there were barely any walls to protect you from flying elsewhere to be the most difficult. Overall, just a really relaxing experience (as indicated by the tag), and a good way to calm the mind. If I were compare this game to an ice-cold glass of water, I would say it's soothing to the touch.

You aim a ball, and shoot it. It bounces. You get points. It eventually hits a portal to the next level. The end.

What makes this game fun is that you can play around with angles and see how a small change in the magnitude or angle of your vector can completely change the path of the ball. Isn't mathematics great? You can also try to get the high score by bouncing the ball against the walls as many times as you can while still completing the objective which is a fun "side goal" while you are playing. The game becomes more difficult as you progress through the levels, but you can make a level has hard as you want it to be, depending if you want to get a sick high score or not. Even on the more difficult levels, it is still challenging in a pleasant way. Speaking of pleasant, the music was pleasant, calm and didn't annoy me. A bit of calm background music while you are casually playing with your ball is always good. The game shows effort has been put into it and I haven't experienced any bugs. The game has some fun mechanics, such as getting points for bouncing against the wall, breaking cracked blocks and cob webs which allow you to re-aim your ball. Perhaps in the future, more game mechanics could be added. A level editor would be nice too, so people can make their own levels and release them on the Steam Workshop.