iPhoneGlance Rating: [rating=3]
Sometimes, and only sometimes, I actually enjoy games that offer a challenge at more than one stage – with many games nowadays; you only have one threat, one challenge – and the rest you pretty much take off your mind as normality. On some games, you fight zombies, but never think that the people your with will stab you in the back, that kind of thing.
Even though Neon Starlight has absolutely nothing to do with zombies and doesn’t have any enemies (at least the levels I’ve got up to didn’t), it provides two difficult challenges, time and survival. You are robot, on some sort of cushioned asteroid flying around the atmosphere.
Your goal is to collect all the space matter in all their forms before the timer runs out – your time can change depending on how you move, when you are flying, you take more time (energy) away from the robot. There are running boosts to help you speed up.
The second challenge in your way is actually navigating your robot around the small area, there are many holes which the robot can fall down, and once he does he is sent directly back to the start. When you are running round this little cushion-paradise, being moved back to the start can be catastrophic.
If you fail to reach the timer, you start again, when you collect all the space matter a portal will open up, you can jump through into another area. The game also feels a bit like an arcade portal, with the robot and white cushions, if only we weren’t in space.
The game is very fun and riveting, it allows the player to enjoy the game while always keeping them on their toes and glued to their screen. While it does seem a bit dull at first, once you try to complete the levels, it does become a tiresome yet enjoyable challenge. Tiresome due to the sheer amount of time it took me to complete the training level.
What I found is the game can be a bit jerky sometimes and controls will not function correctly, or may take some time to compute, it is this split-second decision that the app makes that can push you off the cushions and back to the start, something we all get annoyed about.
The interface is nice when you are playing the game; colours are vibrant if someone basic and I find the experience to be enjoyable if nothing else. I was pretty upset to see that there is no connection to Game Center or Openfient, or the app possibly making their own leaderboards.
When opening the app, you will find text and buttons to be a little lacklustre compared to how some apps look, instead of flashy, bold and designed text that is bordered, you just get normal text with hyperlinks.
I gave the app three out of five, it is an enjoyable if somewhat repetitive game, yet I found a good half an hour to play on it. The interface and menus need to be designed better for gamers and the controls need to be less jerky.
