A bit of a frustrating experience, because it’s sooo close to being a very good to great shmup—weapon-switching on the fly is fun, and the levels are smartly laid out to encourage it; and the music and graphics are excellent—but there’s just too much bullshit design in the way. Tons of stuff kills you without any warning on the first attempt, so it basically comes down to memorization… and once you do memorize the few BS spots in each stage, the whole thing kind of becomes a cake walk.

It’s just not balanced well. I haven’t played IV yet, but I’m hoping it’s so lauded because they kept all of the good stuff about III, and excised all of the garbage, and got the difficulty balance just right…

Pinball meets Twin Stick Shooter in a shallow indie rogue like.
Go Mecha Ball is an overwhelming blur that does everything in it power to hurt your senses. Firstly if you are considering playing this game I highly recommend turning down the music, turning off motion blur and disabling screen shake screen. Not only are all these thing obnoxious and overwhelming the colour palet and texture design is god awful too.
Now for gameplay, it's actually not all terrible. I particularly like the class that focuses on being a pinball as there's something quiet satisfying about bouncing enemy's off the map. There is a fair bit of enemy variety which is nice, however I can't say the same for the boss fights. In total there are 4 main bosses (possibly a 5th if you 100%) that are very unrewarding and painfully easy.
Overall the rogue mechanics are quiet dull and with the game play thats average at best I wouldn't recommend.

For what it is, it’s fine and fun, and a nice first entry in Nintendo’s Picross series.

It just doesn’t compare at all to its sequels. It won’t have as many puzzles, and they’re pretty basic whilst also being unnecessarily cryptic by the end of the game. Lots of guessing involved, and that’s not great for a game like this. It also doesn’t help that you can’t mark the numbers of the completed tiles, and the cursor kind of lags sometimes, which can ruin your run if you’re short on the remaining time.

It’s all doable though, and you’ll find enough fun in this one, but make sure you check out Mario’s Super Picross for the Super Famicom and Picross 2 (also for the Game Boy, Japan-only though) after you’re done with this. Especially the latter.