After you manage to pick up a ball (and it will take some trying on many occasions), your next move is to hurl it at an opponent. This will whittle away at their health bars, which are displayed on the top right and left corners of the screen. The object is to knock out your rivals by tossing dodgeballs at them with all your might. To do this, you can use regular throws or power shots. Just like your character can catch balls thrown at them, opponents can do the same. Along with the ability to run, jump, catch, throw, and use a simple attack button to immobilize opponents for a short amount of time, each faction has a special ability. For ninjas, you can go invisible. It differs for each group, but it proves very useless most of the time. The time it takes to actually use the attack hurts more than it helps.

It all sounds like a very simple and fun premise, right? Wrong, and let’s not forget it is still nothing like dodgeball. To be honest, it’s more like a brawler that tacked on "dodgeball" because of the ball "weapons" your characters can pick up. Actually putting game mechanics to use requires the patience of a saint. You cannot control the camera, so whatever angle the game decides to give you, you’re stuck with. The only thing you can do is move around the arena and hope that you can still manage to get a glimpse of what is going on. Most of the time you have a bit of a tilted, almost bird’s-eye view that makes it nigh impossible to distinguish your character from your opponents. Making this an infinitely more infuriating move is the fact that when the character you are controlling is knocked out, control automatically switches to whoever is left on your team. This resulted in my moving the stick around frantically just so I could try to figure out who I was controlling and where they actually were on the map. I actually won a match by pressing the throw button randomly whenever I thought I knew where my character was, because it was just that hard to tell.

Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball has a nasty rubber-band effect as well. When you kind of get the hang of how to search for your character like in a Where’s Waldo picture, things get a little easier, and sometimes a little fun, when you manage to correctly judge distance and depth. Just when you think you may have the bizarre control scheme and camera angles down, the game tosses you a curveball and ramps up the difficulty. Not only do enemy teams rarely miss, but they don’t have to worry about not being able to pick up balls. Their aim is deadly and their feet are swift, so it takes a lot of practice to get past stages on harder difficulties, if by that time you even care enough to.