Ball Royale - Itch Game of the Week
Yes, everything is a battle royale game now.
Ball Royale is a game by Pangake and can be found at time of writing at this page.
On its itch.io product page, gamewright Pangake explains Ball Royale as a mashup of two major 2018 crazes. The battle royale videogame phenomena and the world cup of soccer, the biggest thing in digital competition and the biggest thing in physical competition. Pangake stated that they hoped the blend of these ingredients this would produce something “interesting and strange.” The game certainly achieves strange, it succeeds as a parody of the battle royale genre by taking genre conventions and featuring them in a work about people kicking soccer balls each other until they die. In Ball Royale you’ll still find the ever-encroaching circle of death, a loot system and even items air-dropped from the sky. But it comes across to the player as deeply silly when they rush across the environment to catch an airdrop of soccer and tennis balls instead of rocket launchers and backpacks. There are already battle royale games that try to be silly. Fortnite is the biggest game in town and that is a game has a vibrant cartoonish art style and a cosmetic shop that aggressively pushes jokey dances, skins and vehicles. But strip that away and it’s still a game shooting people much like your much more serious PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS or H1Z1s of the world. Fortnite’s silliness is performative, Ball Royale’s silliness is intrinsic. Centering its action around kicking around sports balls to achieve murder has a genuine sense of humour to it. After playing Ball Royale, it’s hard to take other game’s in the genre seriously in terms of humour. Developers can dress up their murder games with all the shopping carts and tomato people they want, they are still games about killing. Perhaps making it all so lighthearted is somewhat disingenuous?
Regardless, I want to return to Pangake’s quote from Ball Royale’s product page, the one about hoping the game is “interesting and strange.” I’ve established already that the game is in fact strange, but I don’t want to take away from the fact that I do find the game very interesting. Other battle royale games are about murder, they start with a mad dash to find weapons and positioning before ending in a barrage of gunfire as the impending circle of death forces combatants into a single tiny dot. At no point in the arc of a single game do the players preform tasks that are commonly shared experiences. It’s always stalking and murdering the whole way through. But Ball Royale starts very differently, players start with a ball and maybe one other player who kick the ball back and forth.
They might be trying to kill each other with it, but to the player it feels like they are just kicking a ball around a local park. Something pretty much everyone does in some capacity at some point in the childhood/lives, it’s a perfectly normal activity. That’s how Ball Royale is different from other battle royale games. Those other games have that crescendo of violence and excitement as players are pushed into tighter and tighter quarters. Now Ball Royale has that crescendo as well, but it also has this bizarre transition from people just kicking a ball around into this frantic murder space where people are trying to blast sports equipment at each other to ensure they are the last one left alive. That’s what makes the game such a great parody, the player actively yet unknowingly participates in the ever-increasing zaniness until they are caught by surprise when they snap back to the reality of the moment. It was truly a laugh out loud moment for me. And by explaining it I’ve probably ruined the joke for you, but alas I still think Ball Royale is worth a couple of swings through anyways.
Ball Royale was the game of the week for August 6th, 2018.
