Orbals

I went into Orbals hoping it would scratch that Super Monkey Ball itch - a compact, timed ball-roller with enough mechanical hooks to justify its 100-level count. The premise has genuine merit on paper: pick one of four animal-themed characters (Fox, Bull, Chicken, or the locked Dragon), roll through trap-laden stages, and smash color-coded Mojo Crates by matching your character's color to each crate's hue using scattered color infusers along the route. Routing those color swaps efficiently while the Mojo timer ticks down is where the strategic bite should live. For a few early levels, it actually does. The Mojo system is the game's central engine and its most interesting idea. Mojo acts simultaneously as a timer, a resource for special abilities, and a reward multiplier tied to end-level medals (gold, silver, bronze). Breaking crates replenishes it; using character abilities drains it; falling to your death punishes it. On the Fox, you get a speed boost. The Bull can ram through block obstacles. The Chicken gets a short-burst flight. The Dragon supposedly combines all three, though actually unlocking it seems to stump even dedicated players. In theory, planning your crate-clearing route around ability expenditure is a clean loop. In practice, the loop is undermined by the game's most persistent flaw: imprecise controls. Rolling through the narrow corridors lined with electrified crates feels less like skillful navigation and more like negotiating with physics that have not made up their mind. Magnets that push and pull your character compound the problem, and the spiked balls that home in on you arrive before the controls feel trustworthy enough to dodge them cleanly. Level design itself is not without effort. Verticality, moving platforms, and chutes get introduced as you progress, and the early stages do a reasonable job easing newcomers into the color-matching loop without a heavy tutorial burden. The Steam leaderboard integration means speed-runners have a reason to replay, and the achievement list gives completionists a checklist to work through. The visuals are bright and the music shifts dynamically during play - small production touches that signal FarSight Studios cared about the atmosphere. The problem is that the UI leaves you guessing: there is no clear in-level indicator showing which stages you have already earned gold medals on, which matters a lot when chasing achievements. As a strategy-and-sim specialist I spend most of my time in games with dense decision trees, but I genuinely enjoy a well-tuned puzzle-platformer as a palate cleanser. The decision-making in Orbals - route-planning your color swaps, rationing Mojo between ability use and timer preservation - is the kind of lightweight optimization I can respect. It just needed tighter physics to make those decisions feel rewarding rather than arbitrary. The abilities feel grafted on rather than integral, character upgrades land with minimal impact, and the level variety thins out as repetition sets in across the back half of the 100 stages. With no Steam user reviews and a single critic score of 40 on console, the community signal is essentially silence. That silence is not the silence of a hidden gem.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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