GameSpot: The Ball Review
Where Portal excelled in trimming away filler to provide an extremely focused gaming experience, The Ball stops frustratingly short of the mark. With a disheartening lack of variety plaguing the first two-thirds of the game, it's an unnecessarily laborious task to unearth its finer moments. As an Unreal Tournament mod, The Ball is certainly one of the finest. As a retail product, however, poor pacing keeps it from stacking up against the competition.
