Review | Go Mecha Ball (Game Pass) (2025)

Go Mecha Ball had one of the most headache-inducing reveal trailers of all time. It was prophetic as this game is nuckin futs. It’s on Game Pass day one so I had to check it out. You are a group of furry critters looking to bring fun back to your home planet, to do so you’ll don mech suits with guns that can also turn into a pinball. Through four different levels, you’ll smash, shoot, loot, and scoot your way through waves of enemies. The story doesn’t really exist, the premise is weird, and the audio is mind-numbing but it looks great and the gameplay is sublime.

Furries Unite!

You start the game as Cat Rascal, a silly named and looking cat person that wants to “bring fun” back to its home planet. That’s the entire premise and until you complete a run pretty much all you’ll get storywise from the game. This is a run-based extremely rogue-lite twin-stick shooter with a focus on pinball-style melee. There are four distinct looking/feeling levels with an end boss capping each off. In my first run, I made it to the end of the third level and then it took me many hours to get through the 4^th. It’s a heck of a jump in difficulty and where the game’s rogue-lite mechanics come into play.

Every run you’ll earn two currencies. The first are yellow diamond-shaped coins that only last that run. Before each boss, you’ll get a shop level that lets you either buy up to three random items or put money down on unlocking three characters. The other currency is a blue circular token that persists between runs. These are used to permanently unlock new upgrades, abilities, and guns. Each can randomly appear in between levels during a run or show up in the shop level. Guns can randomly drop from enemies, and there’s a little extra I won’t spoil after you finish a full run.

It’s just enough of a carrot on a stick feel to carry the game progression-wise. You can beat it with your base unlocks but the extra customization on how you want to play afforded by the unlocks helped a lot in making the game feel how I wanted. Combining a rocket jump that blasts enemies around me with an air slam dealt massive amounts of damage in quick succession. My favorite combo was a gravitational pull that dealt damage to enemies caught up in it combined with a homing rocket attack. It just feels so damned good to play.

Pinball Nirvana

Go Mecha Ball is essentially a murderous pinball game most of the time. The controls are basic. A picks up weapons on the battlefield, X swaps between your two equipped guns, the left trigger puts you into ball mode, and the right trigger will do a boost/slam while you’re a ball. The bumpers are your abilities and that’s it. There is just enough momentum to make it feel damned good when you pull off a combo of moves but it’s never so heavy that you feel out of control. The game is frantically paced, and while it’s pretty easy early on the difficulty ramps up a ton in the fourth level.

Upgrades range from the basic “more hp” to the specific “do more gun damage at higher combo levels”. The UI is too spread out for my liking with your guns up in the top-right corner requiring you to pause if you want to see your ammo count safely during the heat of combat. Cooldowns will appear as small circles around your character, though they too are difficult to see when the action is heavy. In the top left is your HP and combo meter, again tough to keep an eye on when the enemies are constantly attacking from all sides.

Every level, outside of the shop and bosses, consists of 3 waves. You’ll need to track down every enemy on the small maps and take them out to proceed to the next. Once they’re all D E D ded you’ll get a portal to move on and have the option of 1 of 3 different abilities or upgrades. Rinse and repeat this three times and you’re at the boss. Repeat that 4 times and you’ve done a run! It’s a simple premise carried entirely by its fantastic gameplay and good looks.

Beautiful but Chaotic

Go Mecha Ball is a good-looking game but I highly recommend turning the screen shake and flash down to half of their norms. The game’s visuals are already noisy enough without the extra madness thrown on top of it. I also turned the audio down as the game’s music and sound effects combine to punch your eardrums repeatedly for the 30-45 minutes straight that a run can take. This is a smaller title carried by its art style and solid performance. The only hitches I encountered were during the portal loading screens. During gameplay no matter how big the enemies were it felt like a locked 60fps on my Series X and 120fps on my PC.

I don’t want to harp too much on the audio, but it did give me a massive headache early on. Combine that with the progression bugging out and never keeping my early unlocks available and I ended up playing on mute for the majority of my review. It’s not poorly done, per se. Things don’t clip or sound out of place. It just hits my brain in the wrong way, so your mileage may vary.

Bugwise I only had the aforementioned issues with unlocks reverting to locked in my first few hours. Either a patch or good luck hit and eventually, my blue coin purchases stayed unlocked forever and the game became far more enjoyable. Go Mecha Ball also has one of the weirdest things I’ve seen on a console game. The ability to close it from the main menu. You can just choose to quit the game and it shuts down on an Xbox. It’s kinda nice?

Wrapping Things Up

Go Mecha Ball is a fantastic title to get on Game Pass. It looks great and plays incredibly well. The audio package and setup may leave me wanting but I can see this being one I dive back into repeatedly over the coming months to experience its sublime gameplay.