An epidemic has come over Southport the past couple of weeks. Collisions, teacher’s scoldings and outcries ring in the halls at any point in the day due to this infection. What is this? “Ballz.”

“Ballz” is an app where the player starts out with one ball and gradually gets more to break tiles. The tiles have a number on them, and that number is the amount of times the tile must hit the tile in order to break it. The difference between this game and other various “Breakout” or “Blocks” games is that the player doesn’t have a rebounder at the bottom of the screen. The balls will bounce off the walls and the tiles, but once a ball hits the bottom of the screen it’s out. Once a number of balls have been shot, there will be a small white lightning bolt in the top right corner that allows the player to speed up the ball’s’ motion.

Between each level, the remaining unbroken tiles will move down a row, and more tiles will slide down above, along with orange and white rings that act as either currency or a ball addition when hit. With these rings the player is able to buy different colors of balls as opposed to the white the player starts out with.

My high score was 90 for about two days. This may seem like a lot, but it was a one-time event apparently, because I just could not surpass 29 since then. Later, I was informed about a hack, or cheat. Once the line of balls in motion, if the player does not like the shot taken, simply press pause, without hitting the speed up button, and then press main menu. Then, once on the main menu screen,hit play and the level will be restarted. Once I was aware of this, I passed level 90, 300, 600 and even 1,000.

A problem with the game would be that once more than 100 balls are being sent, even with speeding the game up, it can get a little boring to sit and wait. Along with how the game sometimes crashes when the balls travel too fast. Despite these drawbacks, the game does a good job of keeping the player involved with the options to be able to buy things and the limited restrictions requiring actual money.

Even though I have been criticized for my method of getting the score that I have obtained, I still enjoy to play the game and overcome the high number on my tiles. Compared to other games, I’d rate this a four out of five. While the game can get boring after a couple hours of play, it’s addicting and frustrating to the point I want to keep playing.