Partly good, mostly noobish
2
Graphics
6
Sound
7
Value
6
Tilt
2
I purchaced the two Peggle games, Peggle Deluxe and Peggle Nights on Steam. I have played through Peggle Extreme, the demo version and some of the characters in Nights. I can now say a pretty solid opinion about the game
On the good side is the art direction, the audio-visual side. When you hit all the orange pebbles to clear the level and your ball sinks into one of the five bonus slots at the bottom, the game displays Beethoven's Ode to Joy and fireworks. It is an Apollonian mode per Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, just a raving party. Or as the contemporary youth would say, it's gay. You should know that 'gay' meant just 'happy' in the 1930's American English. Another great impression comes from Peggle Extreme's menu screen where there is a unicorn, the first of the game's characters to appear, the headmaster of the Peggle Institute. A head crap landed on its horn from Half-Life 2, pearced by the horn, and the unicorn is stubbornly crunching on the *huge* field of flowers. Someone said that this was a scary headcrap zombie, but it was just the opposite. The art direction is showing real insight and intellect throughout.
This concludes the good points that came readily to my mind. The following are problems in the game. First, the game play is poor. The ball that you shoot at the pebbles feels like a rigid metal ball. It should be more like bouncy, heavy wood or rubber. The ball just drops down, and the aiming doesn't work. And when you have enough speed, it shoots off the bits as if repelled. The physics are mediocre. The headmaster's specialty is an aiming helper, that shows a line from your gun and an angle through the collisition with bits on the ball's path, but without it you don't have any indication as how to learn to aim. As the game relies on accuracy as the main source of points and strategy in the various arrangement of maps, the game is helplessly ruined by this poor behavior of the ball. Only with proper ball controls could you use the game's auxiliary components such as the score multiplier and the moving catcher at the bottom, that may restore the number of your balls. Another indication of the lack of vision are the various specialties of the others students or characters. These specialties include a widened ball catcher, a multi-ball, a bomb, flippers etc. Unfortunately these features feel as an apology to the poor gameplay. They are not a rewarding and fun variation to a solid game play. You just get a series of excuses that make it less easy to lose the ball. It is not the player's fault that they lose the ball constantly without hitting anything, while trying their best.
Conclusion:
The game looks good on the outside, and it is an attractive Steam mini-game to buy. The art direction creates a sensation of atmosphere, realism or control, that all the best games create for the player, that lacks in most biggest productions. But this is all that Peggle Complete achieves. doctor_kaz wrote in his Deluxe review 'Peggle is the ultimate in casual, mindless entertainment.'. Yes, when you are doing something else while playing Peggle, it is possible to overlook the fact that you are just shooting balls randomly down the drain. As usual, the low-budget Steam games are rarely patched later, so this is probably all you'll get.