Polyball

Fourth run at the same banked corner, and I stabbed the stick instead of feathering it. The ball drifted a hair wide, clipped the lip of the track, and dropped into open space while the timer kept counting like it was laughing at me. Restart was instant, no loading, no menu. Attempt five I eased into the same corner, carried the momentum through the exit, and knocked a second and a half off my own best. Then I did it eleven more times because I was convinced there was another half second hiding in the second half of the course. That compulsive one-more-go rhythm is the whole pitch here, and when it clicks it is genuinely hard to put the pad down. What you are actually playing is a time attack built around momentum rather than jumping. You steer a rolling ball through obstacle courses full of ramps, narrow ledges, boost strips and gaps, and the skill is entirely in how you manage speed you already have. Braking is usually the wrong answer. Learning where to let the ball run wide and where to pinch the line is the right one. Studio Monolith clearly took notes from Trackmania's restart loop and from the old Monkey Ball school of punishment, where one greedy input undoes ninety seconds of clean driving. Steam Leaderboards give the whole thing a spine, because a course you thought you had beaten suddenly looks sloppy next to someone two seconds ahead of you. Add the level editor and Workshop support and the course list keeps growing well past what shipped in the box back in December 2017. On the couch it turns into something else entirely. Split screen supports competitive and co-op play, there is online PvP and online co-op for people who are not in the same room, and Remote Play Together covers the friends who are technically in the same room but live four hours away. Four players on one screen is the mode I keep coming back to. Nobody needs a tutorial, everybody understands "do not fall off", and the failure state is funny rather than humiliating. It reads the room well at a party, and the short course lengths mean losers are back in the next round within seconds instead of watching someone else finish. That said, playing this on a keyboard is a genuinely bad time. Fine stick control is the entire game, and digital inputs give you full lock or nothing. A controller is not a nice-to-have, it is the price of entry. The rough edges are real and the mixed Steam reception is fair. The camera is the biggest offender, especially on tight vertical sections and around loops, where it swings just enough to cost you a run you did not deserve to lose. Difficulty scaling is spiky rather than smooth, so you can cruise through a stretch of courses and then hit a wall that expects near-frame-perfect commitment. Physics can occasionally feel inconsistent on collisions, which is poison in a genre where you need to trust that the same input produces the same result every single time. And the online side is thin. Matchmaking depends entirely on other people being there, and this is not a game with a bustling lobby list, so treat online PvP as a bonus for a pre-arranged group rather than a reliable feature. Solo players who want structure and progression rather than raw leaderboard chasing will probably run out of motivation before the course list runs out of content. So, who is this for. If you have a pad, a competitive streak, and a taste for shaving hundredths off a run you already technically completed, you will get plenty out of this. If you host game nights and need something with a thirty second learning curve that four people can pick up half-attentively, it is a strong addition to that rotation. If you want a polished single-player campaign with a clean difficulty curve and a camera that never betrays you, look elsewhere, because this one asks you to forgive some jank in exchange for a very satisfying skill loop. I would happily leave it installed for party nights and dip back in solo whenever a friend beats one of my times, which, annoyingly, keeps happening.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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