Team Legendre’s Akimbo Paddles! had one thing on its side when I booted it up on my 360, I had no clue what it was about.

When I saw the cover art, what appears to be Godzilla double paddling in a game of table tennis, I thought I was in for some ping-pong. Instead I found myself playing a dual-stick casual game where the goal is to keep the balls afloat with two independently controlled paddles.

On the demo I was able to make it through the first seven levels only while failing once before the trial time was up (pretty good…I think.) Some of the balls needed to stay afloat while others needed to connect with their matching pair–balls, pairs of balls, balls, testicles. There, we got that out of the way, although don’t expect the developers to as they make several innuendos to “needing a pair” to get through the next level.

All harmless immaturity aside, I found the dual stick aspect to be fairly challenging. The one saving grace from a much more difficult game is that players are assisted by a solid box in the middle that acts as a divder between the two paddles. It essentially works as a reliable stationary object for the balls to bounce off of, a huge help when there are six objects flying around on the screen.

One more thing I’ll mention is the game features some very interesting music from the band “The Thorn and Tear”, who rock on about some stuff that has nothing to do with the gameplay, such as troll slaying.

The full game offers four ball variations, 24 levels and an endurance mode as well. A fully realized version of the product would probably include a few more bells and whistles along with more levels and variations, but for $1 it’s at least worth its weight.

Try/Buy via Xbox Live

[This is a "first impressions" piece based on less than an hour of gameplay, not a review.]