The Ball is, as I said in the review, one part Indiana Jones and one part Portal. There’s no whip, Fedora or teleportation, but it is very much a combination of those things and makes itself something fairly new in the process. That’s what makes this game pretty great. It feels at once new and familiar. Plus there’s zombie squishing!
Alright, the game gives you a Hexen-like relic (really it’s an alien artifact I think, but it reminds me of Hexen) that allows you to control the massive ball, which is otherwise useless to humanity. But with the power of the Ball you can do wondrous things. Like solve massive amounts of puzzles. Sometimes the Ball is a real pain even though its your only companion in the game. Well, there are some cubes in the game but you can’t really take them with you so the Ball is your buddy. It will save your life, and probably cause you to lose it once or twice.
The Ball can also be your mount. There are achievements right in the game that tell you it is possible to ride the Ball. I haven’t managed to do it just yet for more than perhaps a meter. But I haven’t really been trying. I’ve been trying to push through the game and there’s a lot of it. The levels are massive. Luckily, when you achieve whatever it is you must do in a certain area, the game actually tells you. So you don’t waste time trying to figure out what you’ve missed.
There are all sorts of hazards in the game as well, aside from the slash-you-to-shreds zombies. There’s lava pits and spike tracks and generally an unfriendly environment. One thing that usually is not your enemy is water. In fact, you can drop zombies into it and they’ll die. I did 
run into a couple zombies who are smart enough to not do that and I also saw some that were smart enough to get out of the way of the Ball. Of course you can sort of wield it like a club and swing it about you as well which works against incoming zombies. Plus you then get to bathe in the zombie blood when they get all squishy. Nice!
Really the Ball mechanic is sort of similar to Twin Sector which gave you push and pull gravity control. The thing about The Ball is that you can really only control it and a couple items in the environment that are made specifically for you to move about with the weapon.
