The problems with Marble Blast as a game aren't very hard to diagnose, especially if you're like me and played it after Marble It Up.
The difficulty curve jitters wildly from "could do with one finger with my eyes closed" to "frustrating far past a point I'd deem fun". The powerups are kind of janky, most obviously so the gravity modifier. Levels seem cobbled together, blocky elements often either overlapping and clipping into one another, or with plenty of small but visible gaps. Speaking of which, barely any of the levels are really all that conducive for the best part of this game in the first place, which is being able to go fast. Nowhere is this more apparent than what I'd dub as the "gem arena" levels, where you just navigate a bunch of paths aimlessly until you've picked up all the gems, some of which might be the same color as the level itself, basically camouflaging them, which makes for a particularly annoying experience.
That being said, though, Marble Blast is still decently fun. Most of these issues you can ignore (at least up until some of the harder advanced levels) and if you pretend this game is just the beginner, intermediate, and, like, the first half of the advanced levels, it's pretty good!
Unfortunately, difficulty in this game (in the later levels) is mostly done just by stringing together a ton of decently easy challenges in a row with no checkpoints, which doesn't really feel all that accomplishing in the end, and if you make one small mistake later on it's kind of a pain in the ass to redo everything in the level up to that point. Like, the level design up to that point already wasn't great, but after about 10 levels of dealing with that kind of thing I threw in the towel only 15 or so levels from the end. I might go back, but probably not.
The difficulty curve jitters wildly from "could do with one finger with my eyes closed" to "frustrating far past a point I'd deem fun". The powerups are kind of janky, most obviously so the gravity modifier. Levels seem cobbled together, blocky elements often either overlapping and clipping into one another, or with plenty of small but visible gaps. Speaking of which, barely any of the levels are really all that conducive for the best part of this game in the first place, which is being able to go fast. Nowhere is this more apparent than what I'd dub as the "gem arena" levels, where you just navigate a bunch of paths aimlessly until you've picked up all the gems, some of which might be the same color as the level itself, basically camouflaging them, which makes for a particularly annoying experience.
That being said, though, Marble Blast is still decently fun. Most of these issues you can ignore (at least up until some of the harder advanced levels) and if you pretend this game is just the beginner, intermediate, and, like, the first half of the advanced levels, it's pretty good!
Unfortunately, difficulty in this game (in the later levels) is mostly done just by stringing together a ton of decently easy challenges in a row with no checkpoints, which doesn't really feel all that accomplishing in the end, and if you make one small mistake later on it's kind of a pain in the ass to redo everything in the level up to that point. Like, the level design up to that point already wasn't great, but after about 10 levels of dealing with that kind of thing I threw in the towel only 15 or so levels from the end. I might go back, but probably not.