Realplay Puzzlesphere Review

BY Nicholas Rego | POSTED: 30 November 2007

Wobbilin’ wobbilin’ to your doom.



With the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3 firmly boasting motion-sensitive technology, the ancient Playstation 2 can now firmly head towards retirement. But rather than accept this fate, some game studios insist on trying to put their games to par with those on the next-gen consoles. Enter the latest attempt to woo people back to the PS2 – In2Games’ Realplay Puzzlesphere.

Words fail me as I come to describe my sheer disappointment and frustration with this game. The game concept is deliciously simple – navigate a sphere on a track around a level filled with plenty of curves, pits, gaps, and generally ‘fall to your doom’ areas. While on paper it seems like a fun idea, it translates very poorly in-game. Rather than using your standard analog controller to play this game, Puzzlesphere comes bundled with a silver ball, which acts as your controller. About the size of a grapefruit, the controller tries to look cool, but in fact looks like it was fished out of a sceptic tank. You use the ball to control your on-screen sphere, and tilting it corresponds to the speed and direction in which your sphere goes. At first this may sound easy to master, but operating the handheld ball requires the motor skills of Bicentennial Man and the patience of a monk. The slightest movement can send your sphere careening off the track and into the abyss below, and there is very little to stop you from throwing your sphere full force against the wall in frustration. You do get a chance to pickup a few powerups on the way, but most of the time you’ll be too busy trying to steer straight. When you do somehow get to the end of a level, you just repeat the entire process in a different location.

Because the control mechanics are so dodgy, this game is probably only going to see about 5 minutes of play time, before gamers give up and use the sphere as a mock cricket ball. All insults aside though, the game really could have brought something interesting to the PS2, but it’s the controller that is truly the game’s downfall. I found that even when I held the ball perfectly still, the on-screen sphere started drifting towards the edge of the track, and before I could react and guide it back, it had already toppled over and I had to start again.

Visually the game is pathetic as well, with grainy, shaky backgrounds of cloned textures and terrible shading. The reflections in your on-screen sphere appear murky and distorted, and there is very little happening on-screen to keep you playing. An out-of-sync soundtrack completes the macabre ensemble, so in the end all you have is a shiny ball for your dog to play with, and a disc to use as a mug coaster.

I fail to see why such a horrible game would be even developed, and with other games in the series being sold as well, it’s safe to say that they are all going to suffer the same crippling controller problems and graphical nightmares. Puzzlesphere may have seemed like a good concept, but ultimately it fails to impress on any level, with bad graphics, a messed up controller, and no replay value. Unless you want to test your sanity, keep away from this series at all costs.