Never quite lived up to what it was capable of.
+ The Ball derives a lot from Portal. You begin by encountering a special gun that has two functions, which control a giant mysterious ball. If you hold down the left mouse button your gun will charge up and when you you release it next to the ball it will propel it forward. Likewise, the right mouse button attracts the ball to your gun as if it were magnetized. This concept is a neat variant of Portal but the implementation of it is nowhere near the polish of Portal. Don't get me wrong, the game is fun to play for a short time. The problem is that it doesn't take you long to realize all of the puzzles are extremely easy and repetitive, making the game grow very boring very rapidly. Sure some of the puzzles are clever but they never challenged me or stimulated my mind like what I was hoping. Besides the puzzles, there is also an action element to the game since enemies are introduced and you have a health bar. The combat is very similar to the puzzles, though, and ends up being easy and repetitive. In the final part of the game you do encounter some new enemies that require a slightly different approach but they are still rather timid and easy to take down. In general the ball is not that hard to manipulate, though it's obvious that attracting is easier and more rewarding. The propel function takes too long to charge up and requires that you be directly touching the ball. It's clear that the idea of controlling a ball with a special gun could have made some interesting puzzles, but sadly most of them involve you standing on the same switches over and over again.
Story/Presentation: 2/5
+ Apparently there is an actual story here but the only way to understand it is to find all the secrets, read the text from them, and decipher their cryptic meaning. If you're the typical gamer though you won't experience this and when you finish the game you will be very confused. The setting for the story in an underground Aztec/Mayan civilization is real interesting and I wanted to learn more, but I never really knew what everything meant. Sure the game could have been fine without a story but when they wrapped it up with all the attractive environments it's hard just to sit back and not know what happened.
Graphics: 3.5/5
+ The graphics are good but I wonder how much time spent on graphics could have been spent improving other parts of the game. A small comment I had is that there are too many static parts to the environment. By this I mean there are lots of things just sitting around that can't be interacted with, which can be a little disappointing and distracting. They don't push the Unreal engine to its limits but they are decent enough for this game.
Value: 2/5
+ The single player game can be finished in about 5 hours. There are four extra survival levels which are kind of fun except if you find the right location they are a cakewalk. There are also secrets you can go back and try to find but I really don't feel like playing this game again. $20 is a very hefty price and I would definitely not recommend you buy it at full price. If it goes on sale for around $5 it might be worth it somewhat, but you really should not expect anything brilliant here.