A few weeks ago, I proposed to a few colleagues to try together a game I’ve read about on Road To VR: Space Ball, by 31 Labs. The article talked about an indie game that fused Rocket League with Gorilla Tag movement, and since I love both soccer, indie games, and the movement mechanic of Gorilla Tag, I thought it could be a fun game to play together. It turns out I was right.
Gameplay
I installed the game on my Quest Pro, and as soon as I opened it, a tutorial explained the basics of the game. First of all, it taught me how to move: I will describe this better in the Input section, but basically, the game uses the same mechanics of Gorilla Tag, and you can move by pushing your hands toward the virtual floor to jump. You can also dash in a certain direction using the A button on your controller. The game is about playing a sports match, like soccer or basketball, and making your team score one point more than your opponents before the time runs out. If the chosen game is basketball, it is also possible to grab the ball, while when playing soccer, you can only push the ball by hitting it with your body. After the tutorial ended, I found myself in the main menu application, which is a cozy virtual environment with a 2D menu.
The main menu is there to let you customize your options and then start a match. You can choose between:
- A solo training, in case you want to practice a bit your movements. Considering that the movement mechanic is a bit crazy, my suggestion is to enter this room before trying an online match. It is a bit boring to play alone but trust me, they will be some minutes well spent;
- A training session with bots, to play some training matches. This is a good option when you have mastered the movements but still want to practice scoring and facing your opponents;
- Joining a public match. In this case, you can either start the game yourself or join an existing one for which there are not enough players, yet;
- Joining a private match. Also, in this case, either you are the one starting the match, or you join an existing one. Since private matches are not visible in the lobby (they are private, after all), if you need to join them, you have to enter a 6-digit code. We needed a bit of time to identify where the person that starts the match can find this code to give other people, because it is not very visible: it is written on the scores board in the stadium (thank me later for that).
When you create a match, you have to specify the characteristics of the match: first of all what game you want to play (e.g. soccer or basketball), how many people you want in the teams (1 v 1, 2 v 2, 3 v 3), how long the match should last (3min, 5min, etc…), and if you want your match to be private or public. After all of this, you enter the arena, and you wait for the other players for a maximum of 2 minutes. During this time you can select which team you want to join (red vs blue, but this can be customized) and then practice a bit on the field. If there are not enough players in the match, you can ask some bots to join you.
After everyone is there, the match starts. The two teams are inside a futuristic stadium, with some audience watching them. The players are in the respective field halves waiting for the ball, that falls from the ceiling of the stadium as soon as the virtual referee whistles. From that moment on, the game becomes something like Rocket League played in VR with the movement of Gorilla Tag. The players start jumping in the field like monkeys, trying to reach out to this big ball and use it to score. The ball has a diameter of maybe 1.5m, so it’s pretty big both for the dimensions of the players and for the dimension of the “net” where to score. And you can move it only by hitting it with your body, so basically landing on it after a jump. This gives playing with it the same vibes as when playing Rocket League (which, for those who don’t know it, is a game where you use cars to play soccer): the players jump around the field, and try to hit the ball either with the full body or just with the arms, trying to push it towards the net of the other team. The basketball game is kinda similar, with the difference that you can also grab the ball and throw it towards the big “basket” of the other team.
The game is messy by nature: all people will try to jump toward the ball, and many will miss it. Sometimes multiple people hit the ball together, and the ball starts bouncing weirdly and it is unpredictable where it is going to go. Sometimes you manage to hit the ball, but it goes in a different direction than expected. Let’s say that most of the fun is chasing this big bouncy ball, trying to make it go to a specific direction, and mostly failing.
Also, the tactics of the teams may be different: some teams may decide to just have fun and follow the ball altogether, and others can be more organized. My suggestion is to implement some organization, and have at least a member of the team always defending, otherwise you risk losing lots of points. As I’ve said, the ball adds a lot of unpredictability, so it’s quite common that you are attacking and the ball jumps back towards your half of the field, exposing you to a counterattack. To coordinate with your team, you can simply use voice chat, which is well-integrated into the game.
If the match is a draw at the end of the regular time, the overtime will start, and the first team that scores wins. In the end, there should be a winner. When the match finishes, you see the usual match statistics (how much every team member scored, etc…) and you can decide if having a rematch with the same teams or return to your home lobby.
Input and controls
The controls of the game are quite easy:
- You jump by applying a force pushing your hands toward the floor: the stronger the push, the higher the jump
- You can press the A button to fast accelerate in the direction of your head. This can be useful to direct you towards the ball for a stronger hit, but also to jump higher, if you activate this while you are in-air and you look up
- You can press the grip button to grab the ball, but only if the game allows for it (e.g. soccer doesn’t allow for it, basketball does)
There is no way to run linearly, so you will spend your whole time jumping with different intensities and directions, trying to hit the ball either to score or to defend your team. Since the game is rough by design (like Gorilla Tag), it is very hard to land with a jump exactly where you wanted, so most of the time you find yourself jumping to a spot and then having to do other jumps to reach the location you wanted in the beginning. Sometimes you find the ball at like 2 meters in front of you, but you have no way to walk towards it, so you have to perform a micro-jump to hit it, but this operation doesn’t always succeed with the desired precision, either. This uncertainty is going to add fun to the match, as we will see later.
The A button to add thrust is a fun one to use because it lets you perform very high jumps in the air or very long jumps. Usually if you hit the ball after a big jump, you apply to it a very high velocity, and this is good for your team.
UI
The game is fast and hectic, so there is no complex UI because no one would ever look at it. If you want to see what is the current score and timing of the match, you can find it on one of the walls of the stadium, where a big virtual LCD board will give you this information.
Since the game is hectic and it is easy to lose the sense of what is happening, there is always an indicator in front of you that tells in what direction is the ball, so you always know where you should go to try to enter the brawl with the other players!
Multimedia Elements
The multimedia elements of this game, both audio and visual, are very “indie”: they make the job done, but are nothing worth remembering. The visuals are quite simplistic, and the stadium looks like the Wish version of an Echo Arena map, with the audience feeling like the one of Fifa 2000, just in animal form. The colors are fluorescent, and the players are represented by floating robots without legs and with the head of an animal. If you are thinking WTF, yeah, I thought it too, the first time I entered the game.
In this, the game is very similar to Gorilla Tag: the game is all focused on the mechanics, the players’ interactions, and the fun, and voluntarily leaves the graphics a bit behind. In any case, when playing the game, your only focus is the ball, so you don’t care at all about the graphics.
I think that the simplistic graphics, with the crazy touches like the players having the head of animals also contribute in making the game feel a bit more crazy and fun.
Immersion
Given the simple graphics, this game can’t give you much sense of immersion in its digital world. But considering its hectic and fun gameplay, the sense of presence is very strong. As soon as you enter a match, you only focus on wanting to hit the ball to score or to hit it to prevent it from entering your net. All the rest disappears from your mind: you just hop around and try to hit the ball and forget about all the rest. Including the time, which flies super fast. This game sucks you in, so the presence is there.
Comfort
This is a rare picture of the devs behind Space Ball describing the comfort features of their application:
The game is about jumping in VR all the time, in all directions, which is the exact opposite of comfort in VR. Motion sickness can be strong if you are sensitive, plus the continuous movements of the arm may cause your arm strain after some time.
There is also this weird thing that you are without legs, but your torso does not float (like in Horizon worlds), but it touches the virtual floor, so your height in the virtual world is different than the one in the real world: this causes some sense of disconnection sometimes.
Even worse, after the match finished and I removed my Quest, I still had a constant sensation of me keeping doing high jumps even when I was in the real world for a few hours after I played the game. So let’s say the discomfort continues even after you have finished playing.
Fun (and fitness)
This game is crazy fun. It has simple graphics, it has a few bugs here and there (the first time we joined a match, the match never started), and it introduces no particular innovation, but it is incredibly fun to play. And this makes you forgive all the rest.
The reasons for the fun are mainly three: the first is that I think they nailed the right mix of mechanics: moving in the Gorilla Tag style is always fun, soccer is fun, and mixing the two you obtain something cool to play. It is also very easy to understand and whoever can start playing it by just going through a short tutorial. It also doesn’t require you to think: you have just to return to monke and try to score, so it is just pure fun. I remember having different sensations when I instead tried Ultimechs by Resolution Games: the game is similar, but it requires a bit more strategy and thinking, and so resulted in me having less fun while playing it. This game has instead no constraints, and this naivety is what makes it good.
The second reason that makes it fun is its quirkiness. Maybe you have the ball right in front of you, and you have just to push it to score, but then you jump, and the jump is a bit too high, so you miss the ball and an easy score… or you try to jump high to try to hit the ball as soon as it falls from the sky, but then you miss it and you find yourself flying super-high, but uselessly, because the ball now is going in a totally different direction because it has been hit by someone else… or there are a few players close to the ball, and the ball starts to ricochet in a very strange way on their bodies… these and similar situations are the moments where you wonder “WTF is happening”, but with a smile on your face. The multiplayer component is what makes this weirdness fun: the moment you miss an easy goal, your friends that are your opponents start laughing and make fun of you, and you do the same when it happens to them. When the ball is close to one of the nets everyone rushes to it, but most people jump in the wrong way, so everyone is screaming and makes fun of the others, and this makes the game super fun. Playing this game with your friends or colleagues is a great experience I can only recommend. It wouldn’t be the same if the game had easy to master movements: what makes it fun is the difficulty in playing it well, and the fact that you have to move like a monkey to go where you want to go. This creates some dynamics between the players where everyone laughs of the problems he/she is having.
The third reason why I loved it is that it is hectic: the ball keeps moving, and the field is quite small, so one moment you are almost scoring, and 2 seconds later you have to rush to defend your net. There is not a pause moment, you are always jumping, and trying to find the ball. This makes it super fun.
It’s a great game if you want to play some kind of sports game in VR with a fun attitude. I clearly remember the laughs I had that day.
This game has also a great fitness component: after one hour of playing this game, we were all soaking in sweat (I don’t post a picture of how my Quest was because it would be too disgusting). The continuous movement of the arm acts as good cardio, so you also stay fit while having fun.
Just be careful of your surroundings: every time I play this game, I hit something with a punch…
Price and availability
Space Ball is currently available on Steam and Meta App Lab, for free. There is also a dedicated website, but it is more a landing page for now.
Final review
Space Ball is a very fun VR sports game. It mixes quite well Gorilla Tag and Rocket League, in an indie game that is rough around the edges, but that is very fun to play with friends. It’s easy to start and hard to master and its simplicity is what makes it good to play in a carefree way.
There is a lot to improve in stability, graphics, sound, and also on the comfort side (even if with this gameplay, I think it’s impossible to remove motion sickness from the equation) and I know that the team at 31 Labs is working on it. But even what there is today nails what is important in a game, that is the fun and the social interactions, so I suggest you have a match at it with some friends. Thank me later.
(Header image by 31 Labs)