On A Roll 3D is an Indie game developed by Battenberg Software and is a platformer featuring a 3D sphere as the star. You have to make your way through 6 different themes for a total of 24 levels avoiding environmental obstacles, enemies and defeating the boss at the end of each theme. You collect stars along the way as well as other bonuses to boost your score. Each level is timed so you can always go back to beat your previous time and score.

Gameplay
On A Roll 3D starts off with a tutorial on the controls and it’s simple enough in the first level. After finishing the first level this game felt like a cross between a Super Mario Bros game and a Sonic the Hedgehog game. That’s not necessarily a complaint and since it’s a platformer it’s easy to compare it to other platformers because the principles are the same. Even though the character is a sphere you control it like a regular character. For some reason I expected to have to worry about acceleration and deceleration when trying to stop but that wasn’t an issue. I guess the old saying, never judge a character by its look or something like that, holds true here. In this game you’re a ball that can jump. You’re given a certain number of lives that you can increase by collecting bonuses on the map and it’s important to also collect stars because the stars protect you during each level. The various maps are filled with spikes, fire, enemies and other hazards. If you hit any of them you’ll lose 10 stars and if you don’t have at least 10 stars you’ll lose a life. If you fall off a platform you’ll lose a life regardless of how many stars you have. There’s nothing you can do about environmental hazards except avoid them but you can defeat enemies by jumping on them. There is no other way to defeat them. There are puzzles but they consist solely of hitting a combination of switches or moving an object to keep a switch activated. So you will have to backtrack at times to activate all the switches on any given map but it’s still pretty standard. Each map and level is designed well enough to be very different from the last one and they are enjoyable. However when I got to theme 5 and 6 I found myself wishing there was some kind of power up or temporary addition to the sphere I was controlling for a little bit more excitement.

There are boss battles at the end of each theme and even though each boss is a sphere they all present different challenges. Some jump when you jump, for example, and you’re facing them in an enclosed space so there isn’t just one strategy to defeat all the bosses. The bosses became progressively difficult and it can feel somewhat tedious at times when you have to jump on a boss 20 times in this one enclosed space. And there was a slight old school feel to having to defeat a boss and can only get hit once. Overall the boss battles were well done and this was the only part of the game that was borderline redundant to me.

Summary

On A Roll 3D was a simple yet solid platform Indie game. There isn’t any ground breaking gameplay here and it definitely feels like a cross between Mario and Sonic. There are no power ups to enhance your character or give you different options to defeat opponents or bypass obstacles but the  levels were different and the graphics were decent so it was enjoyable to complete each one. The controls and physics were consistent so there was zero frustration in that regard. I had fun playing this game. If you’re looking for a simple platform game to try or even for a child to play I would suggest trying this one.