Video game review: Bola
November 29, 2010
Four of five Stars
Pros: Very interactive, online play
Cons: Can be glitchy, tries to take money from you
Bola is a game made for Facebook by Playdom. It is a game in which a player runs his or her own soccer team that has been passed by their grandfather.
The point of the game is to win tournaments, get levels and improve club property.
This game has player interaction, which is very rare for a Facebook game. Many of these kinds of games involve merely pressing a button, and the game tells a player if they won or lost.
However, in this game, a person actually has control over their team’s wins or losses.
Instead of a loading screen coming up so that it can tally up the stats of each team, a player participates in a real-time soccer game. The real-time soccer game takes control of a payer’s team on the field and leads them to victory.
Along with this real-time play, a player can play games against friends online for experience points (taken in the form of fans in this game) and money.
Of course, with so much innovation, there is always some sort of glitch that has to bring it down. In this game, there will be points where the game will crash and not respond to commands. At one point it froze my whole computer and I had to restart it.
Unfortunately, like many other Facebook games, the designers try to suck money out of the player. For example, in order to make your soccer club look better than just a brown mud pit you are going to have to pay.
All in all, I do think this is a great game, as it brings to the table a whole lot more than previous games on Facebook.
This game’s biggest asset is the interactive experience of actually playing a soccer game rather than just letting a computer come up with a probability of winning.
However, like many games that have something new, it tends to freeze often, but this is something that could be fixed in time.