Review Chovus 2/5 · Jun 18, 2019
Fail!, Right in the Face
Faceball 2000, for SNES
Rating: 4.0/10; Below Average
Faceball is a first person shooter where you play as a smiley face shooting what look and sound like tennis balls at enemies with classic names such as “shootme” and “Ishoot2”. Everything about this game is unpleasant. Your tennis balls severely obstruct your view every time you shoot and they …
Faceball 2000, for SNES
Rating: 4.0/10; Below Average
Faceball is a first person shooter where you play as a smiley face shooting what look and sound like tennis balls at enemies with classic names such as “shootme” and “Ishoot2”. Everything about this game is unpleasant. Your tennis balls severely obstruct your view every time you shoot and they travel so slowly that is it incredibly hard to hit anything. Ever wanted to play as an imp from Doom? Yeah, that is what this game is like. On top of that, both “left” and “right” and “L” and R” control turning. There is no strafing/sidestepping, and with the slow turning speed good luck avoiding enemy shots. Good thing your health regenerates because it is difficult to kill enemies without taking significant damage yourself; especially against the more advanced enemies that deliberately attack you rather than mindlessly mill around.
The game has 3 modes. One is an arena mode where you pick a maze layout and what type of enemies to fight. The other 2 are cyberscape and cyberzone, which are such informative names that I cannot remember which one is which. One of them puts you into a small square maze (with slightly different configurations for each level!) with enemies that roam/patrol and tasks you with killing a certain number to make an exit portal appear. The enemies seem to randomly respawn, so getting flanked and killed from an area you just cleared is a distinct possibility. I found this mode to be excessively difficult and not fun at all. Maybe if your projectiles moved faster and/or you could dodge….
The other mode is like a campaign with larger variation in level design and fewer enemies that do not respawn. For some incomprehensible reason, you have to input a simple code on the title screen to unlock this when it should be the standard mode. The first several levels are mind numbingly simple and take less than a couple minutes to beat. Along the way are tutorials that teach you how to use new things, such as keys, teleporters and powerups. I have no idea how complicated these levels eventually get because I was too bored to continue.
This game feels more like a tech demo to showcase the concept of first person 3D and is in fact one of the earliest first person shooters. I can see how starving FPS fans back in the 90s might get a little bit of entertainment out of this, but not in the current age. The only people who should play this game are those morbidly curious to see how poor it is or those interested in the history of the genre.