Parents' Guide to Marble Knights

While this fast-paced action game can be entertaining for short periods of time as a solo experience, multiplayer is really where it stands out. Marble Knights is one of those titles that's very easy to hop into and play: the longer you long the analog stick in a certain direction, the more your character picks up speed. That adds a bit of challenge to the controls, especially when you can accidentally roll right off a platform into a pit or go soaring off a thin ledge by accidentally having your finger slip on the screen. A controller can help cut down on these mistakes. You'll navigate around levels and solve a variety of environmental puzzles in each stage, frequently tied to a specific marble found nearby that your knight can hop onto and control. For instance, players can hop onto fire marbles to burn vegetation or ice marbles to cross bodies of water. But these marbles also have specialized elemental attacks when they're powered up. Unfortunately, the characters you select at the start of each level don't have unique attacks, which limits their individuality during play. Similarly, the coins and gems that you collect are meaningless, because you don't redeem them at a store or for powerups. They're simply a score marker, which is nice for multiplayer, but otherwise unimportant if you don't care who got the most points on a stage.

The other issue is that you're practically performing the same actions over and over from one stage to the next, which can get boring very quickly in single player. Fortunately, multiplayer injects a bit of randomness and chaos into the gameplay, as you bounce off each other and opponents in the environment. In fact, this is where Marble Knights shines, in a chaotic mass of collisions between players and monsters. If you can't get some friends or family together, you may want to hold off on this game so you don't get bored. But if you've got a group around, Marble Knights could keep you entertained for a while.