The closest I came to playing Glover before 2025 was back when I worked at CEX. There was a copy of the game just sat on the shelf for years and years while i worked there, nobody ever being tempted to buy it before I left. It might even be there to this day! It’s a game that came in that first wave of 3D platformers, with the twist that you’re a magical glove that handles balls. Bouncy, bowling, and metal balls, that is.
The story of Glover sees a spell go wrong with a wizard falling out of a tower, getting himself frozen in place. Not his gloves, though. Glover sets off on a mission to retrieve the crystals to restore things back to normal, while his opposite number has nefarious plans to stop Glover. It’s a simple set up, and before long you’re rolling around different stages, attempting to roll back the crystals to the cave where the wizard waits.
These magical crystals can change into a bouncy ball, a bowling ball, and a metal ball, with Glover having the power to transform them at any time to meet different challenges. The bouncy ball will float on water, for example, whereas the others will sink to the bottom and can be rolled along. The balls can also be slapped, bounced, and thrown, allowing you to get around. When throwing there is a line that shows you where it will land, but when slapping them there is little true idea of where the ball will end up, which isn’t great when you’re trying to beat a boss.
The game is divided into six stages, each made up of multiple levels. The goal is to navigate these levels with the ball, passing the challenges and defeating the bosses.
From the start Glover is not a fun experience. The levels are barren, the balls can be unwieldy, and movement can be frustrating. This is most evident when you’re trying to float the ball across water while running on top of it to get it to move. The directional input inverts when this happens and it can take a lot of time to get the ball out of the water.
Most of your time will be spent fighting the ball and the controls, instead of navigating the level. The camera is unwieldy – as was tradition at the time and hasn’t been fixed for the remaster – sometimes zooming right up to Glover so you can’t see the level around you. Bosses are also fairly uninspired, and paired with these controls and movement, utterly frustrating to fight. In one boss fight, I also encountered a bug where Glover would start running in mid-air, and not grab the ball properly. Whether this is a new remastered bug, or an old one, I’m not sure, but it shouldn’t be there.
At least the music is pretty catchy.
