Rolling a marble through floating courses
Switchball puts you in control of a marble on a narrow course suspended in mid-air. You guide it through 30 levels spread across five worlds: Skyworld, Iceworld, Caveworld, Cloudworld and Lavaworld. The courses are built around real-world physics, so momentum, weight and friction all matter. Obstacles include wooden blocks, sheets of cloth, spinning fans, magnets and cannons, plus puzzles like moving boxes into place. Every level is timed, and finishing quickly earns Gold, Silver or Bronze.
Changing ball types to get past obstacles
The core trick is morphing the marble into different balls with different physical properties. The plain Marble Ball is your starting point. The Power Ball can be charged for an accelerated dash, a jump, or switchable magnetism. The Steel Ball is heavy enough to push large objects, and it tears through cloth platforms instead of resting on them. Other balls have lighter-than-air or electric properties. Since each ball reacts to the environment differently, picking the right form at the right moment is most of the puzzle. A switch that seems impossible with one ball often becomes trivial with another.
Playing together
Multiplayer adds two ways to play with friends. In races, everyone runs the same course and every second counts, including how fast you switch between ball types. In cooperative levels, the design expects teamwork: players combine the unique properties of their different balls to overcome obstacles that one person alone could not handle. Both modes are online.
Before you start
Expect precision platforming on narrow paths where a bad roll means falling off, and expect to replay levels while chasing a better time. The physics are the point, so a run that feels clumsy usually means the wrong ball or the wrong speed rather than a broken control. The game relaunched on Steam as Switchball HD; it was originally called Crazy Ball.