You know you’re in for a challenge when the first screen of a game insists all its stages can be beaten and urges you to keep practicing if you’re having trouble beating a level. That’s what Spaceball: Revolution does, and the warning is apt; this is a puzzle game that demands you earn your victory. Most of your time is split between two modes; a 3D grid that you throw balls in to in order to light up panels and match the shapes the game displays, and a set of bonus stages after those. The bonus stages are easy to understand, since you just shoot balls at flying targets. But the main levels are much more involved, requiring you to quickly learn all sorts of concepts to get the balls on-target, on time.

Spaceball: Revolution starts reasonably enough, giving you a fair amount of time and patterns based on Tetris blocks. This is clearly just to get you used to the game since the difficulty ramps up in a hurry. What starts as a basic grid will quickly have obstacles in your way that force you to shoot around them, bouncing balls off the wall to get them where they need to go. And if that’s not enough, the grid gets larger every few stages and starts to rotate in order to mess up your aim. Add in that the screen zooms out to make precise aim even harder if you take too long, and you can see where this becomes challenging.

The game offers fifteen main levels (plus the bonus stages), though you won’t get to play on all of them until you decide to go with Advanced difficulty. Easy and Normal are thus basically varying degrees of training, things you use to learn the game and work your way up to the real challenge. And when you beat that, an even harder difficulty mode is unlocked, so you may get some decent mileage from those stages. This is just as well, because they are otherwise quite short; each figure/diagram takes only a few seconds to make, and you make ten of them per round. Each stage is divided into five rounds for a total of fifty figures, so a ’clean’ run through any given one will only take a few minutes.

This probably sounds simple enough, and as a concept it is. But the game regularly adds new things you need to do in order to finish a stage, and rewards precision. If you manage to shoot a ball such that it lands exactly between two squares, you’ll light (or darken, if you’re trying to do so) both at once; the same is true for hitting the corner between four squares, you’ll modify all four in one shot. This is even true on shots you bounce off a wall, so Spaceball: Revolution really does reward and demand a lot of precision.

Split-screen multiplayer is also offered, generally competitive in nature though oddly enough each player can pick their own difficulty level. You can also elect to do Free Play, which returns you to stages you have previously completed. These are basic options, but good ones to have and ensure that the game has a good set of features. I suspect the multiplayer in particular will interest some players, and anyone with a friend handy to play it with should give it a try.

All in all, Spaceball: Revolution is a fairly solid puzzle game. It has good controls combined with a premise that is easy to learn but quickly ramps up its difficulty, and offers most of the features one would expect, including local multiplayer along with online leaderboards. While it wasn’t quite to my interest, I’m confident it will thrill those who enjoy intentionally hard games. For 800 Points/$8, this is a fair deal if you’re the game’s target audience, so those looking for a game demanding precision and practice will find much to enjoy here.

Post-review Note on DLC: This game acts like it offers downloadable stages in return for Wii Points, and they clearly have plans to sell some in the future. But it doesn’t have them yet. Attempting to buy new stages in-game will, at the time of this review (Oct. 13, 2009), always yield an Error 206710. Ignore it (and the uselessly vague entry on Nintendo’s support website), it just means the stages aren’t available yet; they will probably be along in the future.