This game is awful. It's so bad, that I'm even partly at a loss for words. How did a game this fundamentally flawed get released, and not only released in general, but how did it pass by Microsoft's, at the time, much more stringent certification process?
Let's just list everything that's wrong with this game:
* They expect you to beat each faction's story three times for no particular reason. There's just more teammates around every time you re-do it.
* The levels are awful and completely unconducive to fun dodgeball gameplay.
* The camera is locked in place, except for when it tries to do "cool zoom-ins" and fails, and on many levels the camera is far too low, making it barely possible to see your characters behind random shit they threw on the stage.
* Crappy menus with very few options. Hardly any match customization in ranked play; can't pick your favorite map or anything at all, basically.
* Poorly distinguished graphics. By that I mean that the Robots team is all gray, and so is the Zombie team. Playing zombies vs robots is basically impossible, since it just turns into a clusterfuck of you, and the AI, wondering what the hell is going on.
* Probably the worst AI I've ever seen in any game ever. Out of nowhere, he can decide that the best course of action is to hog the ball and run away to a corner and stand there. I've seen the entire enemy team just run to a corner and stand there passing the only ball in play to each other. The AI also absolutely adores hogging the crap out of the ball, making it impossible for you to get some play in. You can force him to pass by pressing the right button, but he'll keep trying to get the ball before you and generally just working against you.
* The kicker? You can't play without an AI player ruining all the fun unless you have like four people, and good luck with that in this game.
* Oh, and the AI doesn't even understand the rules to the various mode in this game. It tries to play every single mode like it's Combat Dodgeball, the main mode. It has no idea what's going on when you play Traditional Dodgeball, which can actually be hilarious to watch. I guess that's a mildly good thing?
* The story mode cheats too. All you have to help you are the beyond retarded AI players while the opponents have literally five times as much life as you do. It's one of the most unfair campaigns I've ever seen.
Now, maybe after all of that, you'd think that maybe the game is just horrid in singleplayer and it might be fun in multiplayer, but no, this game doesn't even that. Because...
* The basic controls and fundamentals of the game don't work at all. AT ALL. A clearly pressed attack throw can, in the frames between the ball leaves your hand and when it decides where to go, turn into a pass, meaning that your last attack in a tight match might end up being a pass to the opponent who quickly takes you out with a power throw. A clear pass to your friendly teammate can somehow turn into an attack that just bounces off his head and he doesn't catch it. A clear pass across the level can turn into an attack. Attack balls can turn in the air like they're the bullets in that movie Wanted. That's pretty much the definition of an unplayable game to me. All of this is like if the dots in Pac-Man could suddenly turn into ghosts and kill you as you eat them, or if your shots could turn against you in Geometry Wars. Unplayable garbage.
Avoid this game like the plague, if you value your sanity. I'm not the type of person to wish harm to anyone else, but I have to say I'm happy that it looks like this developer is out of business. They had no business making games if this is all they can come up with. One of the worst, if not the absolute worst, games on XBLA.
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