CRITICAL PLAY: FACTORY BALLS FOREVER
Factory Balls Forever is a creative, captivating puzzle game for desktop and mobile. I had never played this game before, but I found myself surprised at the fact that I was engaged for almost 90 minutes.
The game itself is a pretty straightforward puzzle where the goal is to replicate a given pattern on a ball by applying only the tools at your disposal in a particular order. The tools range from various paint colors to items that you can place onto the ball to mask certain areas and paint over them. The levels start off fairly simple, but get increasingly more complicated as you progress. While the first level took me about 45 seconds to complete and get the hand of using the tools, the last level took about 20 minutes before I eventually gave up.
Level 17: The level I gave up on
The aesthetic that the game holds is quite fitting for the tasks it provides to the player. The icons, in-game user interface, and color scheme, and absence of type during gameplay achieve a minimalistic, modern design. This environment made me feel relaxed in times of frustration and discomfort after many failed attempts at recreating the presented pattern. Similarly, new tools were slowly introduced into the game, which made it easy to follow as I never felt overwhelmed with the task at hand.
Certain strategies became essential to completing the later levels, from making “X” shaped patterns with different colors to splitting the ball with colors horizontally. However, I particularly enjoyed how the higher levels required a combination of these basic pattern-making concepts to make the end goal harder to achieve. For example, the ball might need to be blocked into two colors evenly with an “X” pattern overlaid on top of it. Although some of the individual pieces of the pattern were recognizable and achievable with the knowledge gained from previous levels, it was the order in which these techniques were required that made the game difficult. Despite the frustration of constantly getting the sequence wrong, the comfort of knowing that the patterns were achievable and the relief of finally reaching the desired design and completing the level made the gameplay worth while.
The game does a great job of connecting the levels to each other, yet simultaneously keeping them separated in a way where you can leave and come back at any time. As mentioned, the strategies from previous levels were useful to keep in mind moving forward, but each level was a new challenge that was not directly dependent on the last. This segmentation aspect of the game makes Factory Balls Forever a great fit for a mobile platform, solidifying its casual attitude into the entertainment section of your smartphone.
Overall, Factory Balls Forever does a great job of taking a simple call-and-response style puzzle and turning it into a game that feels like a productive, brain-teasing pass time. Its simplistic aesthetic, progressive difficulty, and calculated level design challenges the user in a positive way.
