I must have been looking the other way during that part of the eighties when Madballs had their moment of fame. I remember Zoids and Gobots and Terrahawks but Madballs somehow passed me by. Thankfully this new XBLA title bearing their name needs no prior knowledge.

Despite having a license that few people will have heard of or care about, Madballs in… Babo: Invasion is an honest to goodness twin-stick arena shooter with bags of content and more innovations than you would expect for 800MS points.
The single player campaign has you control several different characters from the titular Madballs-verse in a Marble Madness style through ten levels of varying terrain in either a top-down or over the shoulder perspective.

Much of your time is spent in labyrinthine environments fighting through a horde of enemies using one of the ten different weapons that you have unlocked during play. Puzzles are simple locked door affairs with a couple of timed sections and narrow balance-beam traversals which all lead you to more corridor based shootery and a showdown with an end of level boss.

The difficulty spikes during the boss battles, as you might expect, but most of your (very retro) three life limit will more often be lost to falling from a narrow ledge than being caught in a hail of bullets. Whilst the controls are simple and responsive, the forced perspective can sometimes make targeting problematic when enemies are on a higher or lower plane than the player.
Compounding the problem is an occasional but noticeable lag in the single player campaign. When new enemies spawn just off screen the glitch causes the screen to freeze for a second and invariably when it returns you have been surrounded or killed or fallen from a ledge.

Despite these annoyances the single player game is an enjoyable blaster with a steady stream of unlockable characters, abilities and weapons plus an online leaderboard and four player co-op mode to enhance replayability.

The five multiplayer modes on offer really bring the game to life though.
It has to be noted that if you have unlocked every character, ability and weapon there is a truly impressive amount of content on offer. There are two factions of Madball, each faction has five classes and each class has two different special abilities. Any character can use one of the ten weapons and each of those has two different firing modes. Weapons and characters also have strengths and weaknesses (heat/cold/energy/projectiles) in a rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock situation. These can then be played in standard multiplayer game modes like Skirmish, Team Skirmish and Capture the Flag over more than fifteen different maps. Phew.


There is still more good news too with an innovative new game mode called Invasion whereby teams take it in turns adding building blocks to the game area in order to create the map. Once the map is complete teams decide where the key strategic points are and then try to attack their opponents and defend their own. It's a really great idea and like everything on Xbox Live works best when you have like minded people to play with.

Finally there is Avatar mode which, as you may have guessed, is the first game to allow your Xbox Avatar (well, your disembodied head at least) to wield a gun and shoot other avatars right in the face. Quite how the developers Playbrains got this approved by Microsoft is anybody's guess but you will be glad they did, few multiplayer game modes are as much fun as this.

Madballs may have a dreadful name and a license tie-in that nobody cares about but this is a genuinely fun, accessible and unique shooter with a stack of built-in multiplayer goodies and innovations that full price titles don't have and is well worth the asking price.