When you go to a carnival, you expect there to be a reasonable chance that the games aren’t stacked in your favour. Most of the time winning depends on sheer luck rather than pure skill; unfortunately playing Bilboquet is just like that.

The game comes with a dreadful control scheme which can’t be calibrated; it’s easy to match the ball with the cup when you’ve just begun the game, but later on you have to become increasingly reliant on the power ups; slow down, one that helps with accuracy and finally one that magnetises the ball and gets you a load of consecutive hits.

Hits are important; to progress to the next level you need 20 of them. Level ups also reset your life bar so that you can have a few failures before you get the game over screen, which is good; but as the game is completely linear you have to endure every stage before you can get up to the one you failed on. We still can’t consistently reach level 6 which is the furthest we got to; even with using the power ups!

The incentive to progress through Bilboquet boils down to a few more skins for the game; and the 50 OpenFeint points that you get for unlocking each one. If you could restart from the last level you died on then it’d be better, but not by much.

Thing is, the simplistic nature of the game just doesn’t gel with the sophisticated Apple mobile devices; this is a nicely presented ball-in-a-cup game that can’t really replicate the real thing. If you’re looking for a challenging accelerometer based arcade game then pick up Dark Nebula and not this hard to control, basic and boring game.

Media gallery

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Why not try...

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  Dark Nebula - Episode 2

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  Sky Burger

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  Infect Them All

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  The Incident