What a game! What can I say?

Balls do 1 damage, balled-up players do 2 damage and you have 2 health. Three players to a team, first team to 10 KOs wins the round, 2 rounds to win the match. Simple as that.
Easy to learn, hard to master is what I think describes it perfectly. This game is 25/25/50% reaction speed, psychological warfare and teamwork. Figuring out the controls takes a whole 2 minutes, getting the hang of how they work takes 15 minutes, and from that point onward you are good to go.

I love that the game is so simple controls-wise. No fancy key-work or actions-per-minute are going to decide victory here. The most important individual components are reaction speed (need to catch those incoming balls) and keeping a steady head (don't get psyched out by a slow ball or feint and catch too early, and DO psyche out your opponents).
But it's really the teamwork that makes a world of difference here. I've had my ass handed to me by (no offense) far inferior individual players because they stuck together as a team, and conversely my friends and I kicked the asses of players who I could not have beaten 1-on-1.

No really, it's not as unlikely as it seems. Teamwork in this game is not hard. There are only 3 things you can do: pass a ball to a teammate, jump in front of a ball to catch it and save a teammate, or knock away enemies to make them drop their ball or just distract them. All it takes is the willingness to help your teammates and it works. Or don't even do it for them: working as a team makes you WIN!

The controls are so easy that, if you don't get psyched out and fall for a feint, two good players could spend 5 minutes lobbing balls at each other and not score a hit. That is where the teamwork comes in. Hitting a distracted player in the back, passing a ball to a teammate (which gives it a speed-boost for a few seconds after passing), catching a ball for a teammate, knocking away/distracting an enemy...these are all actions that can create that tiny little opening that someone needs to score that hit. And with only 2 health per life and 10 KOs in a round that makes all the difference. (Think about it: at 2 health per KO that means you only need about 20 hits as a team to win a round.)

You know what? Even that is taken care of perfectly in this game. Every hit on a person, whether the final KO-hit or the first assist-hit, counts equally. Passed a ball to a teammate? You get an assist. Balled yourself up for a teammate? You will share the KO. Joined a (losing) game in progress in ranked? A win will count for you, but a loss does not go on your record. All the more reason to come in and show everybody how enormous your di skill is.

Don't. Die.
Seriously, even the game tells you this is the most important thing: MVP is not decided by KOs but by KDR. And it makes sense: if you are not dying as much as the enemy, you are winning. And if you are doing great, getting loads of KOs and not dying, but your teammates are, you will lose.

And that brings me back to the teamwork: if catching a ball for a teammate or distracting an enemy saves him/her from even a single hit, it is almost guaranteed to be worth it.

Tl;dr: get it, and play as a party game (locally) with friends!!!

First of all, since you will only have the actual game launched for a fraction of the time you are playing with friends, the number of hours played is not accurate.

This game is a-ma-zing as a party game. It is already fun to play with a few friends online, but get 3-4 people or more together in a room, print out some manuals (it actually adds an additional layer of immersion and stress, rifling through stacks of paper to find out you misplaced that one page you need) and toss in a few beers, and I guarantee you will have an amazing time together.
It is a combination of tension, stress, mental puzzles and communication, and any one of these can be the deciding factor.

Extra tip: if you are sitting around a table with a laptop etc. for the person defusing the bomb, try hooking up a (wireless) speaker and placing it on the table. Having everybody hear the beeping of the timer and the suspenseful music really increases the shared feeling of impending doom, as well as making things just that little bit more chaotic.