One of the more fun roguelikes I have played in recent memory. The art style and direction are amazing and the music is stellar. The game's presentation is extremely well done and has a ton of charm to it. The gameplay is pretty kinetic and moving around as a ball with weapons is pretty smooth albeit some hiccups with how levels are designed. The economy is pretty well tuned and getting ability, weapon, and trait upgrades never feels grindy, which is good considering how much stuff there is to unlock. Moment to moment gameplay is very fun, I just wish the "build" aspect was a bit more appealing. I never really felt like I had to think about what upgrades and weapons I wanted to get since there's clearly a hierarchy of what is better than what. Stuff doesn't "synergize" as much as they cram together to make something.

Overall though, it's a fun time!

The moment to moment gameplay in Go Mecha Ball instantly clicks - Bounching, boosting, jumping at Enemy neck-breaking speed, weaving between bullets, pouncing on robots, is instantly very very fun, supported by smooth controls and a visually consistent style.
The skeleton around the gameplay struggles to support it - the roguelike aspects only allow for very limited build making, runs blend into each other quickly. The content is quite thin, essentially 3 Levels with 3 sub-levels and one boss each, that do not vary between runs. At least half of the guns have no reason for existing and do not feel meaningfully different from one another. Because of that I didnt stick with GMB for long, but give me a controller and let me bounce around a level and I m certain I d have fun again instantly

I'm the kind of person who stays as far away from roguelikes as possible, but this looked cute and I just so happened to get three months of game pass via the purchase of a ROG Ally so I went ahead and tried it.

The gameplay loop is surprisingly good and sees you clearing out waves of enemies while turning your cat mech into a ball and bouncing about to deal damage and do some light platforming here and there. It is a lot of fun just rolling off a ramp and repeatedly landing on an enemy to wittle away at their health. The gunplay is fine, but it wasn't long until I found my favorites and simply ignored everything else.

Roguelikes are known for their brutal difficulty, but I was able to finish this one for the first time after three or four runs. Whether or not I got lucky...I'm not sure. That's one of many things I can't stand about this sub genre.

I really hope the devs will make another game like this with non-randomized encounters and actual level design based around the core mechanics. Like flinthook, I can't help but feel this is a great concept held back by being rougelike.

taking a twin-stick shooter and pairing it with pinball and an emphasis on 3d movement (despite having no jump button!) is something that would normally have me skeptical, but they really, truly made it work. there are some really solid ideas in the systems and animations that make this thing feel great to play from the second you fire it up. it reveals a small handful of issues as you play it though, and while each problem is a tiny one, they stack up in ways a few players might find really frustrating.

for one, it suffers from some readability issues. the game's got a ton of satisfying visual effects but smack in the middle of all the action are boosters and bumpers and jump pads that can be difficult to see when you're focused on dodging bullets (or vice versa). you run into similar issues with the perspective, which is fine 98% of the time but will occasionally cause you to take damage when you attempt to traverse what is actually a really tiny ledge that blocks your movement, or when you try to dodge an attack that's actually passing harmlessly above your head. skill issue? maybe. (probably.)

my other qualm is with mid-run progression. the passive upgrades (i.e. pickups that are not guns or abilities) are fairly underwhelming. some of them can be strong but none of them are truly exciting, with most of them being simple steroids - a boost to ability damage, a boost to fire rate after colliding with an enemy, etc. the guns and abilities force real change in how you play the game, but the game effectively trains you out of taking these passive upgrades with a tremendously boring early selection. the weirder issue, though, is that shop prices before a boss are tuned very strangely - some of the items seem nearly impossible to afford (especially going into the first boss) and you'll rarely be in a situation where you're buying 2 or more items from the shop unless you're grabbing the two cheapest things.

what i find harder to describe is what's actually good about the game - not because there's so little to describe, but because a lot of it comes down to little design tricks whose contributions are mostly experiential. guns feel punchy, there's a real sense of speed when you're in ball form, and the way physics apply to enemies means that slamming into things at high speed can result in some really delightful secondary effects where ramming a single enemy can air-mail them into two more hapless bozos, sending them right off the map. the developers know how to make a game that feels good to play and that becomes really obvious when you're not running into those issues from earlier. popping out of the fast-but-floaty ball form mid-air to take a couple precise shots before balling up again and goomba stomping some idiot makes you feel like a wizard, as does learning how to use your dash optimally - it functions as a multitool, letting good players choose between adjusting their momentum, refilling their ammo w/ a glory kill, or parrying an attack.

i wouldn't go so far as to say that it's a game-changing roguelite but i definitely think it deserves more attention than it's got. it's got a lot of the same strengths as something like Roboquest - hell, they've got the same steam review score - but this has 1/60th the audience. it's 40% off at the time of writing but if $12 USD is too rich for your blood then it's worth watching during the summer sale, if nothing else.