Action Ball Deluxe

In Brief

Action Ball is one of my all time favourite 3D breakouts. It's a little dated graphically by todays standards, but still looks decent. At the time of it's release via Alawar it was way ahead of most other breakouts both visually and game play wise (IMO).

The Game

Amazingly, Action Ball has never been given away before; whereas, it's sequel, Action Ball 2 has been (August 12, 2012!). Action Ball Deluxe; tagged Deluxe because the original expansion was added to the base game after about a year of selling them separately. I bought this shortly after it was released via Alawar, over 15 years ago; of the two, I still prefer the first one, though the second has some innovative additions (you can also pick up the second one on Steam or free from MPC now). I count it in my top 20 favourite breakouts and one of the best 3D breakouts available (despite its age). It may be 'a little' dated graphically, but it still looks excellent and plays brilliantly.

3D breakouts tend to be really easy to beat; Actionball is one of the rare 3D versions that is an exception as it can be quite hard at times; (another one is the exceptional Incrediball: the Seven Sapphire's). There are some interesting additions to the game as well, such as different robots that frequently roam the arena. These either repair damaged blocks, add new blocks or attack your bat (see image below with descriptions). When you destroy a specific number of robots the game awards you a new life, you can also earn lives via a particular power up with a heart icon. You can stack as many of these as you wish; and will almost certainly need them when you come up against the boss robots. You can see a counter along the top of the arena, indicating how many you've destroyed - it counts backwards. When reset you need to destroy 15 robots to earn another life.

There are a plethora of power ups ranging from the usual speed ups and slow down, bat size changes as well as guns and rocket. There are also others such as the crazy/drunk ball, flame thrower, barrier (stops you losing balls), transporter (that moves your ball to a different area, but keeps it's direction of travel), wink ball (that goes invisible and reappears constantly, as well as a totally invisible ball (that you really need to avoid picking up) and a bouncing ball (where your ball is attached to the bat through a wire). When you get down to the last few difficult to hit bricks a power up drops (with a downward pointing arrow) that enables you to complete the level without destroying those last bricks (so long as you allow it to hit your bat)

There are a total of 206 levels to beat. 100 original levels and 106 deluxe levels; plus, you can play through three different difficulty levels. The highest difficult has faster moving balls. Every fifth level includes a boss level where a giant robot try's to destroy you. The first one is relatively easy to beat, but they get successively harder as you progress because they not only send rockets and bombs down on you, they will sometimes dart to the base of the arena to kill you. Sometimes you get two boss robots, which are the hardest to win. The only negative I found with this game was that to save your progress you had/have to complete ten levels to unlock the next set of ten. If you leave the game at level 9 when you return it will have reset to level 1. As I was addicted to this and other breakouts at the time it wasn't an issue as I'd often play twenty or so levels at a time.
When you leave the game always click on the 'save and exit' button otherwise you will still lose your progress. The score board always keeps scores from the end of each session. So you may find your score board
filling up rapidly if you play a few levels at a time.

If, like me you love breakout games check my review of Action Ball 2 over on Steam. At the end of the review I've listed some excellent free breakouts, including another of my all time favourite breakouts that is now free directly from the developer called Breakquest.

https://steamcommunity.com/id/Whiterabbit01/recommended/1186340?snr=1_5_9__402