Space Expedition Review - App Review 4U

Space Expedition Review

Anything But Spacious

A space expedition is not exactly new territory for games. Funny, since “expedition” implies discovery of something unknown, and there’s no greater unknown than space. Yet, thanks to decades of sci-fi games spanning every gameplay type, we’ve seen more than our fair share of the cosmos. With this in mind, I’d expect a game that goes as far as to title itself to be particularly exploratory.

is a pixelated side-scrolling platformer in which you play as a lone astronaut investigating the first signs of alien life recorded by a remote research base right before it lost communications. Gameplay consists mainly of jetpack platforming, with a few item-based puzzles thrown in.

It’s all perfectly functional. It uses the tried-and-true controls of similar platformers like and (left and right buttons on the right side of the screen, along with a jump and action button), and even the toughest challenges in the game are offset by generous checkpoints. There are hidden gemstones to be found in each level, which welcome exploration and unlock the “good” ending if discovered.

It even looks slick, nailing the uniquely mobile pixel aesthetic popularized by . Your astronaut character is a simple, black figure with a giant helmet, and the background art has a lot of nice gradient detail that suffuses the landscapes with a sort of cosmic wonder.. The enemies, though infrequent, don’t quite match the pixel scale of the rest of the world, but look good in their own right.

So fits all the prerequisites of being playable . Unfortunately, there is nowhere near enough of it. I completed the game in 45 minutes flat.. And I wasn’t just blowing through it; that’s 100% completion. Every hidden gem, every diary, both endings. 45 minutes. This isn’t some kind of twitch mobile puzzler that you replay for high scores. This is intended as a narrative experience.

And the narrative simply isn’t there, thanks mainly to sparse content rather than poor content. You’ll encounter dead scientists with attached diaries, but those diaries are all one just sentence long, and the only story they impart is a generic tale of escaped aliens. Even the game design seems like it’s rushing to get to the end. New mechanics, like picking up crates or drilling downward, are introduced for half of a five-minute level and then discarded.

Because it’s so polished, ends up feeling like an A+ final project for a Game Design class. It works almost seamlessly, succeeds at keeping the player interested, and proves that the developers are perfectly competent. But it does not feel like a product that one should pay money for. It’s time to graduate to real game.

Supply Hardcoredroid

Space Expedition Review - App Review 4U