Review: Slyon Ball

Slyon Ball is an isometric 3D block-breaking game in the vein of Arkanoid. It's also a pay-to-win game, but it's relatively simple, and not very good, so you're unlikely to buy anything.

Graphics:
There are six or so 3D-rendered animal characters, and they actually look pretty good. They're suitably smooth, and their animations are fluid. You can toggle between high quality/low quality/no shadows, which looks about how you'd expect. High quality has anti-aliasing, and low quality is blocky. I didn't notice any difference in gameplay speed, but it's possible that if you're running multiple apps at once, the shadows could cause slowdown.

The gameplay backgrounds are pre-rendered, and look terrible for the most part. Well, I'm assuming they're pre-rendered. There's no reason for them not to be, but if they're not, then at least that would explain why they're so sparse and unattractive.

Who thought that hideous grass was a good idea?

The blocks you need to break look like garbage, too.

The fonts on the buttons and so forth look okay, but for some reason they're not centred vertically. It just looks sloppy.

More care should have been taken with font placement.

Sound:
The effects are decent. Blocks explode with a suitable boom, and the animal noises are cute.

The music, on the other hand, is junk. It's grating, and not at all appropriate to the level design. It seems like they more or less picked some songs at random.

The music and sound effects can both be turned off individually.

Gameplay:
If you've played any block-breaking game, then you've played Slyon Ball. There's almost nothing unique about it. Slyon the lion kicks the ball, it breaks blocks and bounces back. Some blocks take more than one hit, some blocks are indestructible, and some blocks have power-ups. Only one of which is actually useful.

Multi-ball is the only useful power-up.

You move back and forth by tapping to the sides. For some reason, they decided that Slyon should move more slowly, the closer he is to where you tap, so you just have to tap as far away as possible and let go when he gets where you want.

The only thing that's sort of unique is the ability to call upon a pal to break some blocks for you. There are four different pals, but as far as I can tell, they all do exactly the same thing. They run on the screen and randomly break one block, or possibly a stack of blocks if you've upgraded your pal in the shop. You see, some blocks will give you coins, which you can use to unlock more pals, whistles which allow you to call on your pals, and upgrades for your pals. You can buy coins for real money in various amounts ranging from 120 for 99 cents to 3000 for $19.99. It's really not necessary, though. The game's simple enough that you'll barely need your pals.

There are four 'pals' but they all do the same thing.

Oh, and there's a monkey that will occasionally run out and toss an additional block for you to break. It's mostly fairly benign, but on one level I found that it just kept stacking them in the same spot. A spot I found quite difficult to hit, so eventually it built a tower that wasn't entirely visible on the screen. I restarted the level.

What I liked:
-Lots of levels. I think there are 6 groups of 15, for a total of 90.
-3D characters are cute.
-Multiple ball styles. They all do the same thing, but at least you can switch it up a bit.

Ten balls. They all do the same thing.

What I hated:
-The monkey. Oh, how I hated the monkey.
-No pause button. It'll pause if you change focus or minimize it, but it would still be nice to have a discrete button.
-The font is fine, but anything with words on it looks weird.
-If you have exactly the number of coins needed to make a purchase in the store, it won't go through.

No matter how many times I tapped, I couldn't buy those 100 whistles.

-Because it's in isometric 3D, even if the ball is bouncing straight backwards, it moves like it's on an angle. The whole movement effect is pretty lousy in general.
-Slyon's hit radius is such that he can kick the ball multiple times before it starts heading back up the screen.
-The game isn't multi-touch, but your hands are, and if you hit with more than one finger, it can lose track of things. Several times I wound up running to the left even though I was tapping on the right.
-The ball's hit box isn't always set right, so it won't actually reach the sides of the play area, and it'll bounce off nothing.
-On the first group of levels, as the ball moves back the shadow moves away, so it looks like it's flying or something.

Check out the top right corner of the play area.

-Sometimes the ball will clip through blocks.
-The pals come in and break blocks. Sometimes they'll break otherwise unbreakable blocks that you don't need to destroy. Sometimes they'll glitch and won't break anything.
-Scrolling the level select screen is harder than it should be. You have to drag it a fair distance before it'll cycle to the next level.
-The music is terrible.
-One power-up makes the ball move slightly faster (I think) and another makes it larger, but doesn't appear to have any gameplay effects. Both last for around five seconds, and are essentially useless.
-Occasional graphic hiccups.

Note the top block in the centre is hovering. It's not supposed to do that.

Final Verdict:
Slyon Ball has cute characters, but overall it's a poorly-executed mess. There are just too many bugs and glitches, and too much else wrong with it for me to recommend even downloading it for free.

Slyon Ball is available for free with in-app purchases from Slyon Studios LLC on BlackBerry App World
Reviewed version 1.1