App Preview: Perfect Bounce 11

Coming soon to the App Catalog will be Keen Studios’ third app. Following after Checkers and Checkers Pro will be the new Perfect Bounce game. Perfect Bounce is a basketball-themed game where you literally try to shoot hoops, though it’s a little more in-depth than you may think. Thankfully, none of my nonexistent skills from the court needed to be transferred over to Perfect Bounce, though there are some concepts that you’ll need to understand before you become the next digital Michael Jordan.

Chief amongst those concepts is gravity. Perfect Bounce is afflicted with this horrible malady that conspires to keep your basketball on the ground. And so, to get yourself some air time you’ll find that you actually have to dribble the ball, just as if you were playing an actual game (fancy shoes are optional). The ball responds to flicks up and down, so repeated flicks up will work to keep it aloft (as if you’re constantly hitting it from below) and flicking down will serve to force the ball into the ground.

The floor, walls, ceiling, and hoop are all hard surfaces that will rebound the basketball when struck. The space between the ceiling and the hoop is somewhat narrow, so don’t be expecting any high-thrown mid-court three-pointers here - everything is a one point foul shot. Your goal: get the ball through the hoop as many times as you can during the allotted time (from one minute to fifteen seconds).

Overall, Perfect Bounce is a fairly simple game, which means that for the most part it runs very smooth on webOS. As with games like Air Hockey, there are some background processing issues with the way webOS works that will lead to the inevitable hang-up or slowdown on occasion, but thankfully there’s no computerized opponent here that isn’t distracted by the pause. Speaking of pauses, there appears to be no way to pause the game, so even if you switch to another card the clock keeps running down in the background.

The graphics for Perfect Bounce are decent (I’m loving the font), they’re not exactly ground-breaking. A few visual tweaks for a more dynamic playing court could stand to be made, such as having the ball spin, the net react to the ball passing through, and maybe a more scoreboard like shot count and high scores. They’re small things, but they would help to create a more immersive atmosphere and make the game feel less like its made of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

That’s not to knock the gameplay, because once you get used to the dynamics of the game Perfect Bounce becomes perfectly playable (five shots is more than I’ve ever made with a real basketball, probably more than I’ve ever made in my life). With a bit more graphical polish Perfect Bounce could end up as a quality entry in the world of webOS games.

Perfect Bounce, by Keen Studios, will be available soon in the App Catalog for $.99.