Devilish: Ball Bounder (aka Classic Action: Devilish in North America; aka Devilish in Europe) is the third game in the Devilish series and was released thirteen years after its predecessor, Devilish: The Next Possession for the Megadrive/Genesis. It was developed by Starfish Kaihatsu and released for the Nintendo DS in 2005 in Japan and Europe, and 2007 in North America.

The gameplay is mostly the same as the first two Devilish games, in that you control a pair of paddles (or bats, or whatever you want to call them), and must keep a ball bouncing through various levels and prevent it from dropping out of the bottom of the screen (because if that happens the ball will disintegrate and you’ll lose a life – or a ball – of which you only have a limited number). When the ball touches a new area that it can move into, the screen scrolls forward to reveal more of the level. The ultimate aim is to drop the ball into the exit hole at the end of each level before the timer runs down.

There are breakable blocks, zombies, skeletons, wizards, insects, canons and other hazards along the way, all trying to slow you down, and your aim is to power through them as quickly as possible to the exit. Like in previous Devilish games there are chests that you can bounce the ball into to drop power-ups that will help you keep the ball in play, like bat extensions and ball enhancements, and even extra time.

Different to previous Devilish games, instead of reconfiguring the paddles into pre-set positions you can now rotate the top paddle in 45 degree increments through a full 180 degrees (basically into eight different positions). It could be argued that this is not particlarly intuitive, but it works well enough.

Each ‘world’ has a number of sub-stages – usually three – with the final one being a boss battle. Defeat the boss (by hitting a specific part of them with the ball enough times) and you move on to the next stage.

Devilish on the Nintendo DS wasn’t particularly well-recieved when it first came out, and after playing it for a while I can see why. Graphically, the game is patchy. The first level looks okay, but the second level I thought was pretty poor – in terms of use of colour and design. The backgrounds also use a weird isometric perspective that looks a bit ‘off’.

That said, Devilish plays well enough. I certainly wouldn’t say that it’s a bad game. It’s easier than the Game Gear and Megadrive games (on ‘normal’ difficulty although there’s also a ‘hard’ option), and the dual screen of the DS certainly adds a welcome new dimension to the gameplay, but the presentation is definitely lacklustre.

Devilish on the DS is worth playing if you’re a fan of the series or like Breakout/Arkanoid-style bat and ball games, but it’s unlikely to really ‘wow’ you.

More: Devilish: Ball Bounder on Wikipedia