Seeing as Marble Abduction! Patti Hattu is a marble-based platformer, its influences and its points of comparison are pretty obvious: you take a little Super Monkey Ball, a little Marble Blast, and you’ve basically got the ingredients for the game.
The thing is, while it’s accurate to call Marble Abduction a Super Monkey Ball/Marble Blast imitator, to write it off as solely an imitator doesn’t really do the game justice.
For starters, the aesthetics are completely different. In Marble Abduction!, you’re controlling a person who’s been abducted by aliens who are running their abductee through various timed courses that are designed to sort of look like Earth. Consequently, you have a man trapped in a ball rolling through environments that are roads running at crazy angles, houses and cars plopped down in random spots, and very squishable aliens scattered all over the place. While I wouldn’t say that Marble Abduction! is a more mature game than Super Monkey Ball, it’s definitely going for a different vibe.
For another thing, Marble Abduction!’s controls are a lot tighter than those I’ve ever seen in Super Monkey Ball. While I haven’t sunk countless hours into those games, I’ve played them enough to know that I wouldn’t call them precision platformers. In Marble Abduction!, by contrast, you’re racing against the clock through some fairly tricky courses. While the game gives you some handy extra powers like boosts and parachutes, you still need to be able to race at high speeds and turn on a dime. It’s to the game’s credit that it provides you the tools you need to do just that.
Which is why you can call Marble Abduction! a descendent of games like Super Monkey Ball and Marble Blast, but you can’t call it a clone. It brings its own style and its own unique demands to table, which means that if you’re a fan of the genre, you should probably check it out.
BandanaKid provided us with a Marble Abduction! Patti Hattu PC code for review purposes.
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