Red Ball 4: Volume 3

Red Ball 4: Volume 3 continues the rolling platformer series, and the appeal has not changed: a round character, a hostile world, and physics that do exactly what you expect. It runs in the browser — no download, no account, no install.

You steer a red ball through levels built out of slopes, crates, moving platforms and water. Rolling is the movement, momentum is the difficulty — a ball that has been going downhill for a while does not stop on request, and the traps in the sewer are arranged to take advantage of that. Jumping is the only corrective you have, and it is deliberately floaty enough to feel like a decision rather than an animation.

The level design is friendly in a specific way: rather than precise platforming, most rooms ask you to figure out how to get some object from where it is to where it needs to be. Some of that is pushing, some of it is hitting things in the right order, and none of it moves faster than you can look at it. There are enemies, but they are obstacles to route around rather than things to fight.

It is a mouse or keyboard game on desktop and works on a touch screen, and the levels are short enough for a phone session.

On cool games spot this page is the index entry: cover, description, and search terms. The game itself is loaded from a third-party web build in an iframe on Play, so nothing is bundled into the site. It is filed under action, so it appears alongside the rest of the platformers in the catalog.

Press Play and find out.