Review: Toasterball

Toasterball was received for free for review purposes.

Toast. Balls. What else is there to say about Toasterball? Well it turns out, quite a lot. Toasterball is simple in theory: you play as a toaster battling another toaster to keep a ball from smashing through the wall behind you by popping your toast up to bat the ball away from your side. Essentially it’s like Pong with more movement, better graphics and fun theming.

The beauty of Toasterball is its different play modes

It may be a simple game, but the beauty of Toasterball is its different play modes. As you play you unlock different modes of a range of difficulties, including invisible ball, infinite toast, where instead of popping up one slice of toast, your toaster shoots up dozens, and even an 8-bit homage to pong. The different play modes are far more than aesthetic so different skills are required, meaning you could be great at the portal mode but terrible at the basketball mode This means Toasterball players can keep improving their gameplay long after they’ve mastered the original mode.

Even without the other modes, the original game of Toasterball is fun on its own. The mechanics are based on real life physics (apparently, I only passed my physics GCSE thanks to CGP guides so I wouldn’t know the difference) so the ball and toasters movements are often unpredictable, which means even after hours of playing and mastering the techniques you can still end up losing because the ball got stuck between you and the wall. These complex mechanics, as well as the difficult-to-get-the-hang-of controls mean Toasterball has quite a steep learning curve – it took me about five matches just to beat the computer once. I don’t think that is necessarily a disadvantage to the game though, since this just means it takes longer to master and learn all the techniques.

I only passed my physics GCSE thanks to CGP guides

I will say that Toasterball feels a little more like a very well developed mobile game than a console game, but at £8.99 I think the price reflects that. Plus there are no ads featuring kings drowning to death which make you question your feelings about constitutional monarchy as a whole and now you just want to save that poor king from the big snake chasing him so you download the game but it’s completely different and you’re left wondering what happened to the king, will anyone save him; can anyone save him?