One of the hardest genre’s to get right in the gaming world are Volleyball games, over the years there’s been different approaches to it and this is no exception for Powa Volley, so how will it stack up?
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You can choose from a list of local games, such as Quick Game, Classic Mode, Story (which has no storyline to it) and Tournament. In quick game you get to choose the rules and you play against a random character. Classic mode is pretty much the same, however you play as a generic blob character which have no special abilities. Story mode is a set of 5 matches that take 5 points to win, the tournament is a 3 tiered tournament with 15 matches to win and can have multiple players.
There are a few mini games including hitting the ball into the basket, target the ball at a specific area of the screen, and a breakout type game. They are good additions but they only provide a few minutes amusement each. There are 8 characters to choose from each with a special ability including a clock that can pause time briefly, a cannon that can stun the opponent and a ninja character that can teleport to the opponents side.
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The gameplay is rather basic, you jump around on your side of the net and can even move when in the air and try and bounce the ball to the other side of the net without your opponent hitting it back. You can also use each characters power by pressing the B button. The first thing I recommend you do if you decide to try this game is to finish the story mode with any character, that way you unlock turbo mode for classic and quick game modes which makes the speed of the gameplay more like it should have been by default in my opinion.
The graphics of the game are good on some points and bad on others, for example the menu graphics are not really up to par. After the initial menu screen all the other backgrounds for the menus are a spiral image obviously done quickly in Photoshop, even if this was cleaned up a little it would look much better.
The characters look pretty good, the style makes me think of those emoticons you see advertised on the internet. The animation of the characters are not bad, and in general the graphics for the stages are as well drawn. The only real problem I have with them is there’s a lot of aliasing noticeable, especially on the beach level, other than that they work well with the style.
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The computer AI is rather unbalanced, they just seem to randomly jump in the direction of the ball and end up hitting 99% of the time and can always use their special abilities perfectly. The character cast is unbalanced in that there are a couple of characters you can instantly gain a point with if you have a full power meter for your special ability. I also found a couple of bugs where if you lose in story mode for example, you have the options quit and restart, both choices exited back to the menu the first few times I played. I noticed the odd graphical glitch where the ball would sort of “walk” along the side of the net.
Overall its a somewhat under polished title, no storyline in story mode, no reward for finishing the story mode with each character other than a star in front of their icon on the select screen. The music is pretty terrible and most of the text is badly translated it would seem. The help and information screens are badly designed, all the text is misaligned and it could have looked so much better.
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So in conclusion the gameplay is repetitive and unbalanced, what music there is, is rather terrible. The in-game graphics are not bad but they do give a false impression of a good game at first glance. Coming in at 400 :MSPoints: makes it one of the more pricey indie games, I’d recommend you hold onto your points for something better.
You can find more information on Powa Volley as well as download the trial and full versions of the game on the Marketplace.
Review by CyberAxe.
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