Ah, the Eighties, hazy days spent skinning knees, wearing shell suits with shoulder pads, preening mullets and playing with Madballs. What do you mean you don't know what a Madball is? It's a ball, with, you know, some sort of brain disorder, that does... things/ All right, fine, I don't know what a Madball is either, save for what certain Internet-based encyclopaedias have told me, but luckily, prior knowledge isn't required to play Madballs in... Babo: Invasion, the nonsensically titled new Xbox Live Arcade Game from Playbrains.

At its most basic level, Madballs is a top down shooter, casting you as one of the titular spheres and arming you with a large gun - that you can't hold, because you've got no arms. You roll around a variety of levels, floating gun by your side, shooting everything that moves until it explodes. There are power ups to collect, including multipliers that boost your score Geometry Wars style, grenades and Molotov cocktails that do exactly what they say on the tin, and health packs that fix you up when you get into trouble. More guns, equipment and characters are unlocked as you progress through the game, with the different characters sporting different powers and attributes.

If you've ever played a shooter before then the control scheme will be instantly familiar, with movement and camera control on the thumbsticks, while the triggers and bumpers are assigned to shooting, setting off explosions and generally doing all the fun things. There's nothing particularly innovative about the single player campaign; your gun has two different modes of fire, with some enemies more susceptible to one type of bullet than another, but that's hardly what you'd call original. Plus, the difference in the time it takes is so minimal to make it pretty much obsolete. The shoot/explosion dichotomy is split up by the occasional - and I use the word in the loosest possible way - puzzle, which involves you rolling over the correct button on the ground to open an energy gate to allow you to continue. These sections are never more than vaguely annoying but tend to detract from the experience rather than serving as respite.

Visually, Madballs is pretty good for an Arcade title, with solid backgrounds and decent character models. There's no spectacular visual flair, but once everything's moving there's no lurch or glitching either, just plenty of explosions and squelchy deaths. Enemies are all basically ball-shaped, some rock-like and others all robot-ed up, with others still like white World War II mines. Some are big, some are small, but all need to be dealt with in the same way. The soundtrack's passable, mainly Euro style pop metal, but the voice clips grate after a while, whining snappy catchphrases that mean nothing and add even less to proceedings.

The levels are pleasantly designed, all be it in a spectacularly old school manner, essentially simple mazes peppered with checkpoints where you can re-arm, restore your health and swap characters. They range from a spaceship to a Mayan style temple, with some jungle and dungeon bits thrown in for good measure. All of them follow the same template, building up to a boss fight or a set piece at the very end, and can, to all intents and purposes, be completed by holding down the right trigger and pointing yourself in the direction of the bad-balls. There's no substance to the single player campaign, just repetition.

So far, so predictable really; Eighties toys get their own videogame - it's all a bit mediocre is hardly headline grabbing news. But - and this is a pretty large but - there's more to it than that. And that more to it is the multiplayer. Whereas the simplicity of the single player quickly gets dull, the multiplayer is fast, frantic, frenetic and probably some other adjectives that start with 'f'. More in line with fragfests like Quake Live than anything displaying tactics or subtlety, Madballs is allowed to breathe when freed from the confines of the dreary single player. It's not revolutionary, but as a quick blast it's an awful lot of fun. Indeed, the game's only innovation can be found in the online portions. There are the usual deathmatch, team deathmatch and CTF modes, but the real fun is in Invasion. Here, the level is built by the two opposing sides before the match starts; tiles are placed and nodes deployed, all from scratch. Building the level before the match starts means that the playing field is that little bit more even, removing the issue of experienced players rushing for the big weapons and power-ups before the new guy has a chance to get his bearings.

Sadly though, the good work of the multiplayer is destroyed in one fell swoop; to unlock the more powerful weapons and characters for online play, you have to slog through the single player mode. In other words, to get the best out of the most enjoyable part of the game, you're forced to work your way through the least enjoyable part. It's the kind of sloppy, thoughtless design that could and should have been fixed before the game ever saw the light of day - but as it is, it sours the entire experience.

Madballs in... Babo: Invasion manages to veer wildly over the okay line; occasionally brilliant, oft times frustrating and more often than not simply dull, there's a decent game somewhere beneath the surface, but it's lost amidst bad decisions, repetitive gameplay and a drivelling mythos that very few people will care about. If you enjoy social gaming then it's perhaps worth a look for the multiplayer, but it's as a solo experience there are much better games to spend your hard earned Microsoft Points on.

Reviewed by Harry Slater for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).