Review by: Bob Mandel
Published: June 28, 2004

Remember the mid-1980′s Atari game from the video arcades named Marble Madness? It gave players unbelievable fun, controlling the progress of a marble up, down, and around perilous paths. Success required quick reflexes as well as a sense for when to make strategic, but high risk, moves. Since that time, there have been many variants produced on this theme, such as Marble Blast and Hamster Ball on the personal computer, and Super Monkey Ball on the Nintendo GameCube. Now the German company Cyparade has developed a new offering Ballance, which tries to raise the bar in this subgenre. Does it succeed?

Ballance is a level-based arcade offering with puzzle elements. In this single-player release, you steer a ball over complicated mechanisms and tortuous passages of all sorts through a tranquil cloud world high in the air. While undertaking this task, you need to overcome all sorts of mechanical obstacles, such as seesaws, wooden suspension bridges, jumps and drops, pendulums, sandbags, tilting ramps, ventilators, twisting steel rails, swings, push-blocks, and trap doors. Your goal is to get to the end of each level without having the ball fall off the structure and into oblivion.

The developers treat you to twelve increasingly challenging levels, each quite lengthy and intricate, presenting more complex puzzles and mechanisms than its predecessor. What is immediately apparent is that, unlike many offerings of this type, Ballance demands at least as much in the way of intellectual puzzle solving ability as it does in the way of quick reflexes and hand-eye coordination. Although you do indeed need to be extremely physically careful in guiding the ball through the maze-like structures, you find you need considerable strategy to solve the navigational puzzles you face. A fun example of the interesting decision making occurs on level seven, where you end up dropping onto a circular platform with walls with seemingly nowhere to go. A solution comes only after you realize that you are on an elevator and need to knock the walls over the edge to lighten the platform so you can rise to a different level.

In the process of moving around the labyrinthine structures, a sound knowledge of the laws of physics would be a real asset. Friction, gravity, inertia, velocity, and acceleration make all the difference between success and failure. The developers incorporate an absolutely precise and highly realistic physics model. For example, if you knock a pile of crates situated in a given position off a ledge, the manner in which they fall off is exactly a function of the speed, angle, and construction material of the approaching ball. You need to constantly calculate what the limits are on your ability to overcome predicaments that on the surface seem physically impossible.