IndieFlux.com

What happens when you take shiny balls, magical symbols, interesting combos, and large numbers?  Probably the lottery, but in this case I’m talking about the XBLCG (Xbox 360) game Orbyx by HemiGames.  Orbyx is a combination of Pachinko and Pinball.  I don’t really know how to say this, so I’ll just come right out with it.  Orbyx is a Peggle clone.  What is Peggle?  Peggle is a game by Popcap Games where you shoot a ball from a canon mounted on top of the screen to hit pegs in order to gain points.  To advance to the next level you have to remove certain colors of pegs.  In Peggle’s case it’s the orange ones, in Orbyx’s case it’s the golden ones.

What I think of it: Other than the obvious clonage, it’s a slick, well presented, game, and good as an alternative if colorful magical unicorns and cute animals isn’t your thing.  It’s not that original, but the game still seems like a good value, considering Peggle is about 10 dollars (800 microsoft points) verses Orbyx’s 5 dollars (400 msp).  Read more when you click, uhh, read more.

More.  Okay so you read it, now what?  Oh right, the game review.

Controlage.

You move a cursor (x) around the screen, and the cannon follows that.  You fire the cannon with the ‘A’ button, and then use Y, X, or B to show you the path of where the cannonball will go.  The trigger buttons will slow down the cursor.  This is good because one of the weak points about the control is the left thumbstick is a bit too sensitive.  However hold down a trigger and then you can position the cursor exactly where you want.

Gameage.

Remove the golden orbs by aiming your cannon to hit them.  The cannonball will bounce off other orbs and things and you will get points by how many you bounce off of.  Sometimes you’ll get multipliers and bonuses.  Hit the letters MAGIC and you get different spells like a multi-ball for instance.  There’s also a ball catcher down at the bottom that moves left and right randomly that when it catches a ball it gives you an extra ball.  (More like saving that ball but still the effect is the same.)  Anyways the game is calm and soothing, and won’t get you all tense like twitch games.

Contentage.

Okay so like what is content.  Duh… it’s like what it has in it.  What it ‘contains’.  This includes art, music, and sound.  When an orb is hit harp notes are played, then when you finally lose the ball, the orbs are removed in reverse order.  The music is pretty nice for an indie game.  The particle effects are cool, for example when you get a free ball, stars shoot out of the ball catcher.  There’s lots of fading in and out, and glowing effects, and so forth.  I would say the only draw back in the graphics is the hud graphics look badly scaled.  At least on my tv, which is a full 1080p hdtv.

Final thoughtage.

Even though this is a clone, this is a high quality clone.  If you don’t want to shell out 10 bucks for Peggle on XBLA, you can at least shell out 5 for this on XBLCG, or if you want to get more Peggle love, but you can’t because you have every single incarnation on every single platform, then this might satisfy you.  Maybe unicorns don’t appeal to you, so you would choose this because instead this has pretty female graphics (sorry no sexy bikini babes as the pretty female art are only portraits).  Finally if you’ve never played Peggle you could play this.  The trial version only allows you to play 1 of the four worlds, and only with one of the four characters.

Name: Orbyx, Mystic Orbs of Chaos

Developer: HemiGames

Price: 400 MSP / $5.00 USD

Where you can get it: Xbox Live Community Games. on the Xbox 360

Tags: fun, HemiGames, xbla, xblig, xbox, xbox live, xbox live community games

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 11:41 am and is filed under Casual, xblig. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.