Here’s a short little review of a game that honestly would’ve been one of my favorites had it existed in middle school: Agar.io
I went through a stint of playing nothing but browser games for a good two years, starting in fifth grade. I usually found a few fun ones and would stick with those, and rarely I would try to expand my horizons with a good click of the “random game” button on whatever site I found myself on. I played a lot of games on the Disney Channel website, including those Kim Possible: a Sitch in Time games (which a lot of other people probably loved as well).
I was watching a couple videos while drawing around a year ago, just as something to have on in the background - I’m a fan of the “Let’s Drown Out…” series of casual commentary videos by youtuber yahtzee19. He and his friend Gabriel played Agar.io one day, and I found myself wanting to try out the game myself.
There’s a certain elegance to the rules of Agar.io. You start out as a small ball with whichever name you assign it and you drift around a set arena with a bunch of other balls, your ultimate goal being to eat as many of the tiny pellets (or players) as possible and grow bigger. The bigger you are, the slower you move. Anyone who is smaller than you by a certain margin, you can absorb them. You can split in half using space bar (which you can use as a tactic to attack a smaller ball), or spit out bits of yourself using the ‘w’ key - both of these actions can make you move faster, and can come in useful for escaping an ambush.
Since this is a massively multiplayer online action game, you’ll come across a wide variety of players, each with their own sense of humor about what they name their ball. Sometimes, players work together to go back and forth on the leaderboard - the small one will lure in a separate player, and once the unsuspecting ball is close enough to take the bait, the big friend alongside them will eject a whole bunch of mass into the small one, making it very large so it can absorb the other ball. Collusion, I’d say.
If you have some free time on your hands, check out this neat little browser game. Each arena you start in is different, so you’ll never meet with the same players twice.