Super Dodgeball Beats Review

Full disclosure before we get started, the only memory of playing Dodgeball I have is back in year 6 – I was rubbish at it then, and I surely imagine I’ll be rubbish now, many, many years down the line. So, sliding onto the desk this week is the incredibly confusing Super Dodgeball Beats.

Luckily, this game isn’t actually about dodgeball, it’s actually a rhythm game masquerading as dodgeball. You then press the right buttons in time with music as dictating by shrinking circles around each player. The more you get right, the more you push the score indicator into your blue end, as opposed to the orange end of your opponent – so far, so Guitar Hero, right?

As the game gets into it, just pressing buttons in time with the beat is joined by several other tasks to complete. You then have to start holding down buttons, rather than just pressing, and some strange movements with the thumbstick.

The way the single player modes work is you choose your difficulty level, and then you are chucked into a 10-team league, and must play each opponent once, with three points awarded for a win, and a single point for a draw. After the nine rounds, the points are added up, and the top teams are entered into an 8-team knockout to ultimately determine the winner. That is a lot of grind, and you really need to be winning a lot of those matches to get to the top, and this is where the issues start to show.

I’ll be blunt here, Super Dodgeball Beats is a bit of a mess. As you progress through the difficulties, the pace of inputs and their combinations become tricky, the power-ups make it almost impossible to keep up with what’s actually going on. The AI gets much harder and make fewer mistakes, making any mistakes you make more damaging. This can get super annoying if you were – say, at the end of a tournament and need to be picking up wins.

This somewhat reminds me of Guitar Hero, but I’ve never been so furious with GH as I am here, the main difference is that Super Dodgeball Beats doesn’t seem like a fair challenge. The choice of concentric circles around characters rather than a timeline, makes judging the length of hold and pass inputs a bit of guesswork, even more so if there’s a power-up disrupting your vision. It also doesn’t help that they don’t always seem to land in time with music. A lot of the time, pressing buttons feels more like luck, rather than skill. It’s also worth noting that there are not many music tracks, and the limited tracks will become annoying very quickly.