Toobz

The Good
It's basically a nice idea, with plenty of variety through the levels. The presentation is extremely professional, with passwords, high scores inputted by either mouse or keyboard, and some nice flash effects.

The Bad
Some of the level designs are tortuous in places, and simply not conducive to enjoyment, even when you’re clearing them. On one level, you can only reach some of the targets if the ball is fired out of the direction-randomising block correctly, reducing the whole thing to an exercise in luck.

On others, the ball is automatically fired into a colour changer, making any white or grey balls useless.

On some, the colour changers have blockades straight after (or, more often, several seconds away, eating up more valuable time), so the changer can only generate 2 of the 4 colours.

Quite often you will find that there’s no changer and neither of the balls you have are being targeted by the receivers, so all you can do is send a wrong ball home and lose time.

The grey balls having a bad effect is a definite mistake – it’s infuriating to make a big effort in guiding them home, only to lose 30 seconds. In one game this happened to me 3 times in a row.

All of these things might sound quite interesting, but ultimately they become extremely frustrating, and limit your desire to see what comes next. It’s still not an especially difficult game by the way; I was halfway through it within an evening.

The Bottom Line
A puzzle game that, at the end of the day, suffers from being too clever for its own good, and having level designs that appear to be an exercise in making things as futilely hard as possible. This was never released commercially, which is justifiable; streamlining the ideas a little more might have produced something acceptable, but the whole thing just isn’t addictive and quickly becomes quite distancing.