Review by: Neilie Johnson

Madballs in Babo: Invasion, the new action shooter based on the series of popular 80's gross-out toys is something of a pleasant surprise. The last time I saw the game it was on a three-inch iPod Touch screen at this year's E3 and at that scale all I could really see were colorful balls rolling around willy-nilly. The game is out now on Xbox Live and at its proper scale, proves to be an unexpectedly entertaining action game.

The story of Madballs in Babo—and there is one—is that an errant meteor strike causes the peacefully inert inhabitants of planet Babolon to evolve into combative, gun-toting globules who take up arms—er, weapons—against each other. There's a lot of other stuff involving Mercs, abandoned space ships and an ancient artifact but who cares? In a game like this, even if the writing's pretty funny, the story's still beside the point. At the start of the single player campaign, players choose between two factions: Babo and Scorched. Babo players start with Oculus Orbus who looks like (surprise!) a giant eyeball. Oculus is the most balanced character but as the game progresses, other classes unlock and you can switch among them at Transmogrifying stations located near checkpoints.

Gameplay is seen from either an overhead or an orthographic (almost overhead) point of view and consists of rolling through the environment blasting everything that moves. The controls are intuitive and easy to pick up; you move with the left thumbstick, fire weapons with the right trigger and swap weapon modes by pressing the Y button. You can also throw grenades and molotov cocktails with the left and right bumper buttons and squeeze the left trigger to activate your character's special abilities. Good thing too, because you'll be needing those abilities—and each character has a different one like Rocket Jump, Disarm and Cloak—often as you fend off waves and waves of enemies.

You'll encounter various types of enemies along the way, including thorny gumballs called Chompiis and lava-ball Moltoks, both of which roll relentlessly at you like mindless torpedoes. Then there's the sentient enemies, the Mercs, the robot turrets and the flying bat-thingies called Damos. All the enemies do one of four different types of damage: impact, energy, heat and cold and are best fought off with the damage type opposite from the one they use. Luckily, there's a wide range of weapons, each with two different damage modes so you'll never be caught unprepared.

Madballs in Babo's weapons offer a lot of variety and are the main source of fun in the game. Each faction has its own weapons including the usual rifle, shotgun and rocket launcher types and both factions can use them once they've been unlocked. Weapons like the Beamer, which acts both as a long-distance sniping weapon in Photon mode and a begetter of heat-seeking awesomeness in Missile Swarm mode, can be found scattered around the maps. Somewhat secondary to the weaponry, but no less fun are the various character classes. Different characters play very differently and the ease of completing objectives depends heavily on which of them you're using. Eidolon for instance, is super fast and best at escaping areas about to self-destruct while Jenkins can hack terminals to access friendly turrets.

No matter which character you play, the game's difficulty is well balanced, challenging without being frustrating and has a generous number of checkpoints that keep you from redoing too much of the game if you die. However...I have to scold the designers, not for going with the old-school “limited number of lives” idea, but for punishing the player for dying during boss battles. Yup, if you run out of lives during a boss battle, you have to replay the entire preceding level before fighting the boss again. That said, the levels aren't terribly long, and the level design takes good advantage of the rolling ball movement with varying height levels, speed boost ramps and launch platforms that send you sailing across the map.