I am definitely a formalist when it comes to video games. I don’t think that games without structure or failure conditions are any less valuable as interactive works or as artistic achievements. I just enjoy my time with clickers more than I do, say, The Sailor’s Dream ($3.99). I like structure and progression, having a goal to attain. It motivates me to play, and when I no longer care about the goal, that will get me to stop playing. Simple as that.

So, Magic Shot ($0.99) with its pedigree of these sorts of formless games like Desert Golfing ($1.99) and Golfinity (Free), where they promise just endless play without any real point, had me a bit concerned. Still, the concept and the simple art style intrigued me. What I found was a solid game, with actual structure and the ability to fail, if you wanted to do that! It’s a bit too chaotic to master for my tastes, but it’s still a solid enough experience.

The core goal of Magic Shot, in all its game modes, is simple: you’re presented with a table with a white cue ball, and a red and yellow ball. You must hit the red and yellow balls with the cue ball in one shot to advance. If you miss, then you try again, with the balls staying in the spot where they were. The game has three different modes that provide different structures, but they all are about this same core style of play.

The controls work as well as they should. You can touch-and-drag from anywhere to aim, with two indicators that show you where the ball will hit with its first two bounces. The size of the indicator shows how powerful the shot will be. If you’re doing a powerful shot, you will see the aiming line shake as it gets more difficult to make a straight, accurate shot at that power. You can aim from anywhere on the screen, which means that you’ll never have to attempt a difficult shot because you’re on the edge of the screen. The game also supports both portrait and landscape modes, though on the iPhone, the menu remains in portrait. Still, it’s a mild annoyance, and I welcome any game that supports multiple device orientations.

You may see some Desert Golfing comparisons, and that’s because of Magic Shot‘s Meditation mode. It just goes on and on, presenting you with new tables as you keep advancing, with no failure condition. It throws some wrinkles at you, like balls that move in the direction you’re shooting. Other than that, it’s just about going from table to table, until you get bored and decide to do something else. Your love for the kind of aimless progression that Desert Golfing introduced will determine how far you get with Meditation mode. But that’s not all to the game. Magic Shot is a real game with actual failure conditions in its Purity and Insanity modes. It’s an actual, formalist-approved, video game!

The Purity mode involves you trying to keep hitting the two balls on the table with a decreasing number of shots as you miss. The course starts to bend and get crazier over time, with bonuses for consecutive hits. It’s still a mode that you can play at your own leisure, but you have a concrete challenge to take on. This is the mode that kept me coming back because it trained me more than Meditation mode ever did. I learned how each shot was important. I had to be careful, and not to leave bad lies for future shots. It feels like actual billiards! It is by far the best mode here.

Meanwhile, Insanity mode involves you trying to get as many hits as possible in 99 seconds, with more time earned for each hit. The courses just so happen to leave the realm of plausibility, shifting shape every second to crazy shapes and designs. Also, the scores get into the millions as the multiplier increases at a literal exponential rate. Insanity mode throws any order out of the window, as you’re kind of just trying to keep hitting things. Unleashing the beast at full power every time is kind of the way to go there. Wasting time lining up shots at precise angles isn’t smart because the clock is always ticking.

Magic Shot is curious because it’s such an innately chaotic game that it’s hard to play with precision. Two-thirds of the modes pretty much allow for letting chaos reign, just shooting well enough to hit everything. But only the Purity mode requires the kind of careful aiming that this game demands. It’s because you’re dealing with bouncing one ball off of another, a challenging tactic to try and get down pat. You can get better at it, but perfection is impossible to attain.

So, your enjoyment with Magic Shot is contingent on how much chaos you like in your games. Purity mode will test your patience with this game, though it is forgiving with the multiple shots that you get. But I do wish you good luck in trying to figure just how exactly you’re going to hit some of the shots the game gives you. Meditation and Insanity, while providing opposite structures, both rely on the chaos of the concept to progress further. So, unless you can somehow become the master of bouncing spherical objects off of each other, then just take Magic Shot for what it is: an exploration of a concept, not as a game meant to be fair. As I say when I let loose a pool shot that I have no clue will actually work or not: let chaos reign!