Pocketball is an incredibly polished puzzle game, with a simple but often time consuming goal; get the coloured balls into the corresponding pockets. This is done by attaching ropes to various pegs on the board, forming platforms for the balls to bounce off. In theory this sounds like an easy task but the obstacles, which often alter basic physics, can cause the puzzles to be astonishingly hard to solve.

There are 30 levels in the game, and while the first three are extremely easy and logical, the others seem to heavily rely on trial and error. While this can be good in some games, we felt that it was such a vital element in Pocketball that it actually became a little tedious. Nevertheless, you won’t receive any penalties for failing over and over again in the game, so there’s nothing to lose by continually trying different solutions.

...the puzzles are very well thought out and designed...

What we have said so far may make the game seem bad, but Pocketball does have many good qualities. For one the puzzles are very well thought out and designed, just because we think trial and error doesn't work here, doesn’t mean others won’t have different opinions. The pegs are placed in different places on each level which means you really have to think, and can rarely use a similar solution for each level. To switch things up even more, many coloured balls are introduced into the game, forcing you to multi-task and focus on more than one thing.

Although the biggest challenge you will find in the game are the items. Ranging from Boost Arrows to Gravity Wells, the items can either help or hinder you, but this depends on the context. For example Gravity Wells attract balls into their vortex which can assist you by allowing nifty curve shots, or disrupt you by holding the ball still in the vortex. It all depends on how you place the ropes. Of course there are some items (such as Nukes) that will always be a nuisance.

Stretching a piece of rope from one peg to another is very fluid, but deleting it seems more effort than needed. At the moment there is a button to go from drawing mode to deletion mode which we feel is unneeded, especially since you have to double tap to remove a rope in deletion mode anyway. We also found it annoying that we couldn’t play our own iPod music, and there is no in game music anyway. In any case these are only minor problems and the gameplay is still solid.

The dominance of trial and error might not be our thing but clean, smooth and honestly gorgeous looking graphics help this game to redeem itself. 30 levels may not sound like much but due to the high difficulty they will take you a while to complete. Pocketball is a very lax game since it never really forces anything onto you: The level unlocking system works so that you never have to complete a level to move onto the next, instead levels are unlocked in blocks. This helps to make the game an enjoyable experience that is certainly worth your time and money.

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