The Road to Ballhalla is long and has many curves, but that’s okay because you’re a brave, mighty ball and you’ll defy all the odds sooner or later. The game will taunt you, it will laugh at your feeble attempts to weave your way through floors and beams of death, and it will even toy with your mind through snarky, humorous texts. But you’re blessed (or cursed?) with the ability to respawn infinitely until you’ve reached your goal, losing only your progress since your most recent checkpoint. This enables you to take some risks, live it up, roll way out of the way to go around scooping up collectibles even though you’re quite likely to die along the way and drop them all anyway.
When the game begins you’ll merely be dodging bits of floor that flash red to damage you, but as you progress further you’ll face off against gigantic rolling balls, laser beams, bullets, timed buttons, gates that require key cubes to open and perilous death drops. You can boost as much as you want, but touching anything that would normally injure you instead instantly kills you if you’re boosting. The variance in levels is wonderful, and combined with the great humor in the game I never felt like levels were repetitive or too drawn out.
Each level dares you to complete it in less than a set number of lives and while rolling around getting all of the collectibles. Depending on how close you come to achieving these goals you’ll get rewarded with up to 8 tokens, which are used to allow you to progress to new worlds or enter silly joke areas. My one qualm with the game is that you can’t skip levels; I ended up stuck on 3-1, the first level with buttons that reset after a short period of time, and just can’t get past it. If the game would allow players to access levels based on their collection of tokens I could at least try some additional levels, and it would incentivize me to master previous levels. Unlocking new balls and trails with them is fun though!
Odin welcomed warriors who were slain in battle to Valhalla, so Road to Ballhalla has a fitting name as you’ll die many times on your journey. The game makes a joke of it, in fact, daring you to do particular things that will surely lead to your not-so-heroic death. But perhaps the biggest joke is that you’ll die way more often by accident than from the game’s deviously hilarious trickery. If you’ve got patience and love games that combine a good challenge with humor and fresh levels, you may wanna take a trip to Ballhalla!
Road to Ballhalla is available on Nintendo Switch (reviewed), Xbox One, PS4, and Steam (Windows).
I received a free copy of this game in exchange for an honest review.