Gum Ball Run is a Speedrun Platformer Game. In the Single Player campaign the focus is clearly on speedrunning and earning medals, while the multiplayer is focused on competitive online races.
Players take control of a running gumball, who has to compete in races/ complete the levels as fast as possible. Movement and platforming feel for the most part pretty responsive and good in this game. You can however sometimes get stuck in the environments in situations, where you shouldn’t be. These moments however were infrequent enough, that they didn’t impact the gameplay too much.
The single player missions are usually pretty short, but I did enjoy playing them. Some of them were quite challenging to complete with a gold medal and I only managed to get 28/30, but I mostly had a good time doing it and enjoyed finding the best route for each of the levels. The difficulty however was all over the place. Sometimes you got a really tough level out of nowhere and two levels later you got a total pushover level. The levels could have definitely been a bit better balanced.
The Multiplayer races, were nearly all played on totally different tracks and according to the developer, were the main focus of the game. I do think it is pretty cool, that the dev didn’t use the same levels twice and instead really designed them to either fit a singleplayer speedrun or a multiplayer race layout. Even though gameplay was mostly the same, you could also use something like the superjump ability in multiplayer, which was pretty much never viable in any of the singleplayer stages.
There are some aspects of Gum Ball Run, that I need to criticize, but I also want to praise the game for delivering frequent content updates and quick fixes. I once had a problem with a popup message ingame regarding my internet connection and reported it in the steam forums. The very next day the developer had already provided a patch with a fix for the issue. That’s what I call customer service. The content updates usually release at least once a month and add both, new multiplayer races and themes, as well as additional single player stages. This is generally a really good pace of updates.
While the quantity and the quality of the new levels is good, I do have to criticize some of the updates to the monetization of the game. I do understand that this game is being developed by a single person and since the game is being distributed for free, it needs to make money somehow. There are a lot of skins in Gum Ball Run and I think it is perfectly fine to monetize them. Some other monetization methods however rubbed me the wrong way. The dev for example added a chat function to the multiplayer, but you had to buy it for 50 cents. Admittedly that wasn’t a lot of money, but you should just not monetize stuff like this. The chat is thankfully free nowadays. Instead the singleplayer has been heavily monetized retrospectively. I had played through 30 levels of this game, but one of the last updates simply locked me out of 25 stages I had previously beat. If the game had launched this way, than I would have probably been okay with it. Having to pay now to gather access to something I previously had unlocked just seems a bit wrong to me. Perhaps the dev should have just locked every additional level after the first 30 behind a paywall, if he wants to change his business strategy months into the game's lifecycle.
The singleplayer has therefore become a lot less viable to most players and while the multiplayer is still getting regular free updates, the player numbers have collapsed. A drop in the player count is expected with most games, but Gum Ball Run now has fallen to peak daily player numbers of 15 or less. This could lead to neither single- nor multiplayer really being accessible anymore, which will just further shrink the small playerbase and ultimately lead to less revenue too.
Result:
Gum Ball Run is a fun speedrun platformer/racing game. The game is however not without its issues. I did enjoy both the singleplayer speedrun levels, which invite you to repeat them over and over again, in the pursuit of the best times, as well as the competitive online races. Small issues and the unattractive monetization changes however let the game down. I was thinking about giving the game a 7/10, but because of the Paywall and shrinking playerpool will ultimately reduce it to 6.5/10. Interested players should start the game in the next months, since it might become abandoned till next year.
6.5/10
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