KBounce

Yet another KDE game, KBounce does alright. It's a Jezzball-clone (the second one we've encountered so far), and unlike the first one (IceBreaker (review here)), it's pretty much alright.

A quick refresher: Jezzball games are games where there are balls bouncing around, and you have to trap them in as small an area as possible, liberating all the other space. When you have freed up 75% of the field of play, the level is over. Difficulty is increased by adding an extra ball into the mix with each level. You lose a life when the walls you're trapping balls with encounter a ball before the wall is fully formed.

KBounce looks pretty much the same as its progenitor, Jezzball. This is an improvement over the much uglier version we tackled earlier this month. The balls themselves are very sharply defined, and revolve in such a way as to... 'look really neat,' I suppose, is the technical term. I would suggest that the developers change the horrible font - a sort of beveled faux-digital-clock look that's hard to read and ugly - but other than that, I have no complaints.

There is no sound. Does KDE suck for sound? I think I've encountered one game written for KDE that had any noise at all. This is another one where it doesn't really matter, but it would be kind of fun to have a sound play whenever the balls bounce off of a surface. It would get laughable once you had a bunch of balls in play, but that would be awesome. I like to laugh.

Final judgement? Solid clone of a neo-classical game with solid but ultimately uninteresting mechanics. If other games of the type do it for you, you could do worse. KBounce is a highlight as far as the KDE-based games distributed via Ubuntu's default repositories.