31 Platripedia—Game Tips
IncaBall: Target Practice Tips
This style of puzzle game goes by many names—Incaball, Zuma, Sweetopia, Pirate Poppers—but the core innovative concept remains the same. You must eliminate a string of colored balls that slowly snakes along a path before it reaches its final target. To do this, you must aim and fire colored balls of your own to create matches of three or more balls of the same color to explode them. The game takes the “match-three” aspect of puzzle games like Bejeweled and combines it with a fast-paced aiming. Here are a few tips to help you.
Aim your shots with precision, you can’t afford to miss. When you miss your shot you not only lose the opportunity to eliminate the balls in your target but you create a new target that you will have to clean up later. Don’t fire balls recklessly, it’s better to take your time and make shots that count.
If your target in the ball string is obscured by other balls, then you don’t have to wait for the target to come around until you get a clear shot. Just fire the ball away from the string out into space and lose it. Hopefully, it will be replaced by a ball you can use now. This saves valuable time which you cannot afford to lose.
Once you explode a group of balls, don’t hesitate before firing at your next target. When an elimination occurs, it halts all movement on the ball string until the detached section can roll back and reconnect. This gives you a chance to take some easy shots for a moment while your targets are not moving.
Remember to always catch the power-ups that fall from the ball string, they are almost always worth it. Although different versions of the game have different power-ups, they usually include Slow, Stop, Reverse, Wild Ball, Accuracy, and Explosion. Slow will decrease the movement of the balls for a short time, Stop halts all movement, and Reverse makes the balls move backwards. The Wild Ball will change to match the same color as the balls of whatever target you shoot it at. Accuracy makes targeting easier by causing a ball to hit its target the instant it is fired and also gives you and shows you an arrow will your shot will hit. Explosions generally eliminate an area of balls. Use Explosions on areas in the ball string where many balls are bunched together at a winding point in the path, or on parts of the ball string that contain many different colors that would be time consuming to eliminate.