Ball Breakers’ engine is quite lovely. Every time someone makes a high jump and comes back to the ground, this wonderful rippling effect occurs with the ground. This also happens when you beat someone up to the point that they disconnect from their ball, and the ball explodes. The maps themselves are pretty standard looking, with a lot of muted greens and browns and metals. They look really nice in full 3D, though, despite the somewhat blandness.

The character design in Ball Breakers is nothing particularly special -- the enemies all look pretty much the same, and are better differentiated by color than by any way that they look. You can pick a number of characters to play as, and it’s always easy to tell which one on-screen is you, which is the real important thing in some of the more hectic levels.

BB’s music is nothing to write home about, but it’s not ear-splittingly bad either. It’s the same techno you’ve been hearing for the past age or two of games, and you’ll probably tune it out soon after starting the game. The sound effects are sparse, but what’s there is quite nice, with satisfying booms and flame sounds and whatnot.

When it comes to presentation, Ball Breakers is simply above average.

When it comes to gameplay, however, Ball Breakers starts to shine. It may have a few problems -- the courses get devilishly hard rather quick, and some of them are bad enough to make you want to throw your controller down in frustration -- but it’s a damned fun ride, and one you’ll probably be coming back to.

In this game, you’ll be taking the role of a criminal in the future who has had their legs sawed off and replaced with a rolling ball. Fortunately, you’re not made of flesh, so it’s not all that terrible of a punishment. Err... never mind. The plotline behind this game is near nonexistent, but that’s not going to be why you’re playing the game.

Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses -- some are fast but weak, others are strong but slow. Because of this, they will have to take on different strategies to win in the different sorts of competitions that make up the game. There are a multitude of match types. Some are relatively standard: Last Man Rolling, where you beat the tar out of the opponents; Gauntlet, where you have to race to the end of a level without getting mauled; Tag, where you have to collect tokens in a certain amount of time. Others are actually quite interesting: Powerball requires you to throw balls at a magnetic goal of sorts, which seems easy, but is often non-trivial, and King of the Hill requires you to stay on top of a platform longer than anyone else. Every event is timed, and if you don’t complete it in the time allotted, you lose, no matter how close to winning you were. Most of them have things you must do besides not running out of time, such as finishing in first place in the Race levels or making a certain number of goals in Powerball.

To keep the fun factor up, you can only do a few courses at a time. As you complete them, new Prisons open up where you can do even more battles. Each prison has anywhere from a few to a whole hell of a lot of arenas to compete in, but you don’t have to complete them all to advance. This means that you can skip a particularly difficult arena and come back to it when your skills are a bit more improved.

For all the variety in Ball Breakers, you’ll find that it’s hard to get bored with what you’re doing. Problems arise, however, when the difficulty level starts ramping up and you can’t beat two or three different arenas to advance. And getting a gold medal, which usually means doing something in record time, is often an exercise in futility. It can be done, but it’s certainly not easy.

Ball Breakers starts out relatively simple, with lenient time limits and weak enemies to smash. By the time that you’ve gotten to the third or the fourth Prison, however, you’ll be sweating to survive even one arena. The game gets hard, and it gets hard quick. You’re going to have to practice a lot to beat some of the challenges -- I had lots of problems with Last Man Rolling, for instance, and soon after I got good at that, but then I couldn’t beat the Races to save my life. You’ll find that each Prison has a ‘problem arena’ or two (or three, or four...) that you have to do over and over until you get it just right. Good thing the game’s entertaining enough to keep you doing it.

The controls in Ball Breakers are simple and intuitive, although I eventually had to force myself to memorize which shoulder button did the instant braking. Combat is simple, if non-skilled, and the game’s variety will keep you amused. The menus are clean, elegant, and easy to understand, with something of a brushed-metal woxil look.

Ball Breakers may not be genre-busting, and at times it may be way too damn hard for its own good, but in the end, it’s a decidedly entertaining little title that will supply you with quite a few hours of cheap enjoyment. And for right at $10, you’d be a damn fool not to pick this game up -- it’s better than some $50 epics I’ve played, and you’ll probably be tossing it into your PlayStation over and over when you need a quick fix. Who said a game has to be spectacular? Sometimes, just damn fun is all it takes.