Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls (N64)

Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls feels like a game that best encapsulates not the Nintendo 64 itself, but the gaming world around it at the time. While tent pole titles like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time are what people think of first for the system, many people who played the system also seem to have some memory of Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls. It’s odd but inventive concept didn’t mean they were likely to buy it, but when at a game rental store or perusing a magazine or cheat code book, its strange style stood out enough to cement it in a generation’s memory. Almost 25 years after its release though, Nintendo Switch Online’s Expansion Pack made it easily available to people who could once again dip their toes in without making a big commitment, and Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls almost feels like it’s not meant to be experienced beyond a quick look or weekend rental.

Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls is a platform racer, meaning getting around is a lot more about jumping and running around obstacle courses than simply building speed. However, you find yourself playing as members of the Reckin’ Balls gang, all of them spherical but with different features like Iggy the iguana, Chatter the set of teeth, and Sonny the sun. The round ruffians compete in races to try and determine who the leader of their little gang will be, but the manual spins an unusual yarn about how Iggy and his pals are essentially the villains. While likely meant to be rebellious rather than malicious, the Reckin’ Balls still head to the peaceful Cho-Dama Kingdom and decided to have their fun on their Sacred Towers, ending every race with the winner demolishing the structure they just raced across. There are even citizens of the Cho-Dama Kingdom on these towers trying to stop the racers from destroying them, but Iggy and his pals decided their good times are more important than this kingdom’s historic landmarks.

While races do involve usually heading upwards to make progress, few of them actually look akin to a tower. Instead, plenty of disconnected floating platforms are scattered throughout the sky, the racers needing to leap up to them to head towards a checkered ring at the end. The racers are all mostly identical save for a few small speed differences in terms of movement and grappling, but these won’t amount to much in the long run since the mishmash level designs mean you rarely get much time to exploit such small advantages. Grappling is a key part of getting around in every level though, the floating platforms often out of reach before you fire the long tendril you use to grapple. Grapples can be fired almost too rapidly and are most often used just to reach platforms you otherwise couldn’t jump to, only later levels adding in any need to swing with them and even then it’s more a means to get more jump height rather than covering distance quickly. Oftentimes if there are platforms to pass through above the racers, expect a lot of hammering of the jump and grapple buttons without much thought, and that does kind of get to one of the game’s most easily spotted issues.

Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls has many winding multi-layered levels but how you engage with them is often not all that different. You’ll move across whatever strip of ground is available while locked into 2D movement, identify where you can grapple upwards, and then repeat the process until you maybe go hit a boost pad where you just watch your ball roll for a while and possibly do a pointless loop-de-loop. You do have the ability to boost to get a sudden surge of speed, this good for pushing past other racers or enemies, but there are not often long stretches of ground where speed is key, and when they are, it’s rather boring to traverse them. So much of Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls is about vertical movement, but it also doesn’t exactly make it exciting since a lot of it is hammering the grapple and jump or repositioning since the ground above you is solid metal instead of valid material. Far too often, a tower in Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls will resort to long climbs up armored rings where you can only rise up through one piece of ground that isn’t metal, meaning you go round and round without much to do but the basic repetitive climb.

Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls features 100 unique towers and yet so many of them blend together even early on. While they are grouped into stretches of ten with a world theme, its not like you’ll notice any creative inspiration taken from the candy or deep sea backgrounds that crop up. It’s hard to divine a clear design direction from most towers, something not helped by the fact their names are often unhelpful. While a stage like Fan-tastik at least has you ride the air from spinning fans upwards for a few parts, you also have levels called things like Lebanese or Enchilada, Baby when the stage itself is just more rings, ramps, loops, and floating platforms. What’s more, while these are arranged in batches of ten if you choose to play them in the game’s tournament mode or multiplayer, if you do want to make a custom set of towers to race across, they’re all labeled with generic numbers. They’re all called Tower 1 through Tower 10 on the selection screen and grouped into their worlds, and while there is definitely a difficulty climb and more reliance on swinging in later levels, otherwise it could be hard to really tell levels apart save for the rare moment this game can muster up a memorable layout.

Even worse, the towers in Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls include a lot of moving platforms, including ones that will bring the race to a halt as everyone is made to wait for things to move into position. Sometimes this has a clear purpose, like when the ring sequences try to make finding the eligible ground to grapple through harder by having it move around. Other times though, you can literally be waiting over five seconds just for a piece of necessary ground to lower into view, and if you miss the cycle, then it’s a ten second wait since it has somewhere it’s heading it needs to get to before the return trip. This may be some sort of attempt to encourage players to attack each other, since otherwise it’s often fairly easy for the pack to split apart, especially since a lead earned early is rarely lost unless you don’t know what you’re doing. However, while you can jump on each other or use your grapple to toss each other around, sitting in place and doing it usually isn’t productive and while it will likely get hectic when the platform shows up, players made to miss the platform by attacks will inevitably be frustrated. Some levels can have shortcuts hidden off where you almost need to have first taken your time and explored the course thoroughly to know they exist, but otherwise it’s more likely these slow waiting periods are going to lead to an even bigger gap between racers that can’t be surmounted by the unlucky players afterwards.

Different towers in Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls have different lap counts but many of them already feel too long after only one, especially since the leader is quite unlikely to be caught up to unless the items just happen to pan out for a sudden unearned upset. Item pickups can be found around many towers, the random one-use item you get when picking one up meant to be more powerful if you’re doing worse in the race. Some of these can be real game changers like the Heli-Grapple that will place someone right next to the player in second place, but others like the Star can all but guarantee a win if acquired at the right spot. While it provides invincibility for a time, it also allows you to grapple through armored platforms, meaning those annoying slow ring climbs can be done swiftly and lead to a huge gap between players, and since these comeback items are so rarely given out, it’s not likely anyone else in the race will get a chance to utilize something so powerful to make up for your unearned advantage. Some items like a Freeze or Shrink affect all other racers but don’t often impede them much, and while you can place lingering projectiles and bombs like traps, it seems like the computer-controlled racers have the unique ability to place them on the boost panels.

Normally if you fall too far or off the level, a dragonfly named Evan will swoop in and pull you back to right where you left off. If you get hit on the boost panel though, some of which can be ten seconds of sitting back and watching your ball move on its own, Evan takes you back to the boost panel stretch. While you can recharge your turbos by mashing a button on the boost sections, these are otherwise a prime way for the AI racers to set up an unfair advantage, one they already had since they’ll often almost outright collude. You can bounce on another racer to pop up through platforms even if they’re armored, so expect to sometimes see AI racers that are meant to be competing against each other do that while making sure to avoid you trying to do the same. On the bright side sometimes a computer racer will just completely lose track of the course, and in the tournament mode you don’t need to win every race to get the trophy either. You do need to earn enough points though and there are only four racers, so doing too poorly even in a few races can doom your run. You are able to restart a level safely while in it, but going for something like the unlockable racers which require perfect top placements across a tournament is torturous to attempt. While the game has difficulty options, it also cuts you off from unlocking new levels in Easy so you’ll need to endure Normal or higher where the computer racers are even less likely to play fair. It’s little wonder the cheat code books were happy to put forward level and character unlock codes back during this game’s heyday.

So far little good has been said about Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls, but that’s because as a reviewer I had to play the whole game in a reasonable time frame. In the game’s early worlds where things are simple and you might be playing against human players who aren’t packing knowledge of shortcuts or other tricks, things are sometimes decent. These worlds don’t push the envelope and the problems are all still technically there, but stages with more simple or accommodating designs mean there aren’t those long waiting periods, not so many ring towers, or situations where the right shortcut knowledge just decides the winner inherently. It still feels like once a player has a lead it’s up to them to mess up for other racers to have a hope of making a comeback though, and the battle mode is a bit too chaotic while the items aren’t great for it. The battle mode has players keep a trail of colored spheres behind them that represent their life, but the dedicated levels are often basic tiered designs but still a fair bit too large. Players are likely to keep lapping around the edges and firing off projectiles or bombs that the other players don’t really need to go near. Better items are fairly rare here and battles can just feel like they abruptly wrap up since if players do decide to be aggressive they’re almost gambling on whose attacks will win out. Battle mode definitely isn’t going to win many fans to the game, but if you play Versus only against other human players, there can be little moments where a heart-pounding close race comes together or you can have a little fun slamming each other around in the stages that don’t demand your attention only to annoy you and lead to less competitive races.

THE VERDICT: Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls puts its best foot forward, but it’s not a particularly good one even then. The early towers feel like they can produce some tight races when things are simple and races are quick, but as the races grow more complicated they grow more irritating and repetitive. Levels can feel like they barely stand out from each other due to overrelying on similar stretches of ring climbs or floating platforms and as the players need to work harder and build up some deep track knowledge that’s hard to gain organically, the AI racers will help each other or play dirty. The items barely ever can lead to the kind of comebacks that could keep these later races competitive, and with ill-conceived ideas like abnormally long waits for moving platforms to even be in range, Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls really plummets after a deceptively tolerable opening set of stages.

And so, I give Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls for Nintendo 64…

A TERRIBLE rating. 100 levels sounds like an impressive range for a racing game, before you realize how many are mishmashes of repeated ideas that weren’t even engaging the first time they appeared. The unique focus on climbing upward with your grapple sounds like a unique way to design a racer, but when it’s not about mindlessly hammering the buttons it’s usually about trudging along to the one eligible grabbing point. The items sound like a great equalizer, but most aren’t going to slow the opposition enough save when the AI uses them in ways you can’t. Levels are complicated but not in a good way, the racers being kept apart too often and the awful idea of forcing players to wait to try and encourage a little squabbling at best adds a brief second of excitement before those who get left behind are just frustrated and bored.  The platform racer isn’t a doomed idea, the game Speedrunners would even use a grapple in its far more effective take on the idea years after Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls, but once the game gets past its early phase of acclimating you to how to play, it starts making it tedious and unsatisfying to do so, especially since races can often feel hopeless if you’re not the one to earn the early lead. The complicated tower design can make it even impossible to see the best way to go or even require some experimentation to see the best way onward, something the game doesn’t account for with its terrible level select choices, but you can at least play them separately in a Time Trial mode if you must know the shortcuts that keep doing you in. Too much focus is on a high amount of levels without enough ideas to match though, few levels having a clear identity or memorable portions. I couldn’t even pick Fan-tastik out of a crowd necessarily since other levels will embrace fans just as much if not more, the game not making pressing deeper into the tough stages worth the effort.

Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls ends up being a game you’re almost meant to rent. You’ll play the early parts that seem to work, get stymied when the AI stops messing around and the levels get too tough to gain a consistent edge over them, and likely justify things mentally that if you owned the game instead, you’d build up the skills to actually beat it. You return it to Blockbuster or Hollywood Video but likely won’t feel the urge to rent it again because even the simpler towers aren’t really drawing you in, and yet this racer’s odd concept and characters mean it can still lodge into a small nostalgic spot in your memory. While that type of play session is a thing of the past, now people playing it on the Switch will instead dip their toes in it, likely dip back out after hitting the same barrier to progress, and sealing it away as a memory that won’t motivate them to actually return to try and play more of it. Let Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls be this strange thing you don’t ruin by actually trying to see it all it offers, the odd curiosity I once had seeing it on a book of cheat codes now unfortunately replaced by the disdain built up from trying to conquer its terribly designed levels against merciless AI racers.