Even working at a gaming site, sometimes games come flying out of left field to bonk you in the head like a dodgeball. That was the case yesterday with Ubisoft's release of Game Swing Studio's Oddballers, a 4-6 player party game for Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, and PC. I had no idea that Oddballers was in development, and then *poof*, there it was in the wild.
I sat down last night to take a quick look at Oddballers (which Gaming Nexus will be fully reviewing in the coming weeks), but was quickly forced to surrender my controller to my six-year-old, who now looks at Oddballers with a reverence usually reserved for those squashy little Among Us guys. It turns out that the game - which I thought was kinda fun - is the greatest thing on the planet for a six-year-old. Only a matter of time before he starts showing up home from school with a bunch of wild-ass pictures he drew of Oddballer dudes in weird situations.
Oddballers is a local and online party game, played with 4-6 players (you can use bots if you are by yourself). The game allows you to throw a quick costume on your character of choice and hop into a series of quick minigames, most of which revolve around picking stuff up and whipping it at your opponents. More than anything, Oddballers reminded me immediately of Poy Poy, a forgotten but much-loved-at-my-place PS1 Multitap game that saw players, um, picking stuff up and whipping it at their opponents. The sessions are brief, lasting between ten and twenty minutes, and at the end everyone is rewarded with a bunch of XP and cosmetic unlockables, regardless of who won the overall match.
The game is a bit buggy upon release, with a few visual problems, not the least of which was the words "Now Leaving Queue" splayed across the screen for the entirety of the time we played. But that hardly mattered, as the core fun of the game came shining through to pull in my son with it's cartoony gravitational pull.
I was playing on the default difficulty against three bots, and once I got the feel for the controls, was able to wreck them in every minigame that was presented. But to my son, the default difficulty presents the perfect level of challenge, with him winning maybe one out of every three matches, which makes him howl in triumph. Oddballers is definitely his new favorite thing, and this morning he headed to school asking over and over again if he could play it tonight when he gets home.
So yeah, Oddballers a big hit with the kid. I'm going to have to keep his older sister away from it for a while, or she'll surely take over and start bashing him in multiplayer with her superior skills. Gotta give the kid enough time to get good enough to stand up to her.
Oddballers is now available on Xbox, PlayStation, PC, and Nintendo Switch. The game features cross-play between consoles, so there is a pretty good pool of people playing online right now on all platforms.
