Review of Marble Madness

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snowyowl

Marble Madness Review
By snowyowl on 12 September 2008


Pros: Nice music, and reasonable graphics. You have to give credit for that.

Cons: Not really very fun or interesting to play.

Hmm... Maybe not.

Graphics: Good. The sprites and backgronds were nicely drawn. They were lacking in originality though, and notably the lightning bolts were far from perfect.
Sound: Good. The music was nice, however the "zap" sound when balls are destroyed got irritating. Either use more varied sounds, or use none at all. A game can work with only the background music.
Gameplay: This is where it really fails: where it's most important. You simply click on colored marbles. This destroys them and any connected marbles (i.e. where there is a path between the two) of the same color. But frankly, it doesn't matter what order you click them in, your score will be the same. And there is too much time to do it in, so it's not even a game of rapid clicking like There Are People In The Blocks. There is no highscore table either, so the score seems a bit pointless. Plus, there is only one gameplay room.
Story: None, but then none is needed in a puzzle game so that's fine. I always give 3 stars in these cases.
Interface: Not much in the pros clumn here either. The marbles destroy their neighbours in an order which looks almost random, and makes it hard to tell whether a particular marble will be hit or not. A small bug is: if you click on anything other than a marble, you lose I think 25 points. But the big problem is tht you cannot quit with Escape. You have to exit from the Task Manager, and even then it is not easy.
Overall: Although it looks nice, Marble Madness is really not very entertaining to play. It gets boring far too quickly, and seems exceedingly pointless. The failure to quit with Escape is also annoying. Not really worth playing.

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