Somewhere along the way, I was very fortunate to pick up a large group of friends who enjoy playing games together. One day, some of us might laugh through Fall Guys or Little Big Planet, and the next, we might see some of us trying to keep up with the beasts in COD. Since we all have varied tastes and competency levels, we constantly look for games to add to our library. With that intention, I downloaded Marble Champions to see if it was good enough to become one of our weekly ‘hang out’ games.
Marble Champions is a racing game where you face off against 49 other racers to control a marble going through increasingly complex tracks. While it is based on Marble Runs, this game uses its 3d elements to go further. The tracks come outfitted with speed boosts, tricky Fall Guys-style obstacles, and collectible coins. To maintain your lead, you can use the boosts to slam into other balls, destroy them, and carefully control your speed to navigate the tricky turns and twists. The final version of the game promises to have multiple modes. In addition to the standard format that sees you facing off against other races in your league to climb ever higher, there will be tournaments, daily challenge races, and local multiplayer.
It isn’t a bad idea at all. Considering how complex and cool real-world Marble Runs can be, you can only imagine how much fun and mind-bending a 3d version would be. Except… this game isn’t quite there yet.
A Polished Output
I will be the first to admit that this game is gorgeous. It takes the same approach as Fall Guys, using a clean, blocky design to create tracks and a UI that is easy to read and recognize. There are also a lot of tracks. Or, if these are procedurally generated, there are enough moving pieces to create a lot of unique tracks. Not once did a race track repeat the entire time I was playing. The best part of Marble Champion’s tracks is that, within the overall layout, they echo the feel of a good Marble Run track. There is a lot of verticality, twists and turns, and variation of track sections.
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Marble Champions also runs very well, with the levels and leaderboards loading up quickly. Since this game is still in the ‘early’ stages, presenting as a demo, I do believe that many of the other players in the game are AI. So, I am curious to see if this will be as smooth at launch.
Missing The Finish Line
The thing that makes a Marble Run so much fun is its Rube Goldberg Machine elements. A track that is flawless and smooth enough to have the marble speed down to the end. Now, while I wasn’t expecting the game to have smooth, easy tracks, I was expecting speed to be a major factor. I was expecting the core mechanic to revolve around ball control at speed. When the game mentioned obstacles, I thought it would play like a race in GTA, where you are moving quickly and avoiding stationary obstacles. However, instead of that, Marble Champions plays more like Fall Guys or Mini Golf. It is more of an obstacle course than a race.
There is a fundamental clash here. The physics of the downward slope of the track and the ball means that you still do go fast. Even if it isn’t as fast as you expected, it’s definitely faster than a character can run. Moving obstacles and traps is about timing, something you don’t really have at speed. Now, to be fair to this game, it does allow you to brake, so you can slow down and carefully navigate the moving bumpers, pendulums, and sudden thin beams. It is just really frustrating to switch from fast to slow. More often than not, you don’t slow down in time, crash, or fall off and then restart from the last checkpoint.
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It would still be ok, part of the challenge, if the controls weren’t so sluggish. Jumping in this game quickly became the bane of my existence. Yes… I am exaggerating, but hear me out. Marble Champions has quite a few sections that feature on-ground bumpers. The only way around it is to jump over them if you don’t want to be flung backward and come to a complete stop. Honestly, I was lucky if my ball successfully jumped one in 10 times. At one point, I found myself angrily mashing the jump button, trying to make the first jump and forget the following four after it. In the same way, the ball didn’t always slow down when I wanted it to, leading me to fly off too many obstacles.
There are also a lot of other weird elements. For instance, you can control the camera but there is no point. The game has a fixed camera that is tied to the track and it immediately snaps back. The only reason I still kept trying to control the camera is that the track-based positioning hasn’t been fine-tuned yet. A dip in the track would make the camera rotate down, preventing you from seeing down the track until the track straightened out again.
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Another random element, a big part of the race, is the ability to destroy another ball. The game tells you to navigate onto a boost and then, using the speed, bump into another ball to destroy it. Except each race has 50 players. More often than not, you are hitting the boost with many other balls. When many balls are on screen, bumping to destroy quickly becomes a matter of luck rather than an intentional strategy. Not only can you not tell who is hitting whom, but you can’t always tell your ball apart from the others, thanks to a lack of variation and just the size of the balls. I am still unclear why the same ball as me will sometimes speed ahead, even without a boost.
At The End
Marble Champions still has a long way to go before it can move from being Meh to being Great. It’s still fun in small doses, and there is a lot of potential here as long as the Developer edits his ideas to create a clean concept of what this game will be. After some small redesigns, this game could actually be a stellar racer or obstacle course.
