Roundthird is prepping their first entry into the App Store and they’ve given AppSmile a preliminary copy of it.
Meet Radial 50, a 50-level modern twist on the familiar “breakout” concept. If you have ever fiddled with brick buster style games (who hasn’t), you’ll quickly recognize the inspiration behind Radial 50.
The goal is to break through multitier bricks, called “targets”, and reach a diamond at the center. In a gesture of utter rebelliousness, Roundthird throws the classic up-down format out the window. In contrast, they’ve designed an engaging 360 layout that taunts you to spin your heart out for as long as you can hold on.
Don’t worry, the paddle, ball, and bricks are all still there. But in Radial 50 the paddle revolves around the circular board. That means if your ball travels into the ring on one side, it can exit out the other -- so you have to get the paddle over there quickly.
Roundthird has also included “particles” -- these are small star shaped items that can be collected for bonuses. Particles, Powerups and Powerdowns are released when targets are eliminated. Time bonuses are also granted based on how quickly the center diamond is reached. Bonus values are realized when your score is tallied at the end of each board.
Like a lot of recent releases we’ve been seeing, Radial 50 transforms into a community challenge via the Location Based Leaderboards. Each time a user submits his or her score, other users in the area or worldwide can aim to take them down. We’ve love this idea, but haven’t been able to test it out fully due to the fact that no one has their hands on the game…yet.
Another, noteworthy characteristic that Radial50 introduces is “Achievements.” These are goals that players can aspire to reach. Achievements do not add to a user’s score but instead present opportunities to better the player’s skill set.
Our team has been courting Radial 50 all day and has fallen in love with the soundtrack. Actually, we don’t remember hearing the same song twice in one sitting. We did experience a small learning curve when getting accustomed to the game. Sliding your thumb up and down on the right side of the screen controls the paddle. We naturally wanted to spin our thumbs around the center point instead. This caused many lost games. But, once we got used to the control scheme we didn’t have any more problems with it. Another difficulty was the size of the ball. When we had particles flying around the screen along with the ball we couldn’t easily distinguish one from the other. This element though, is what makes Radial 50 quite challenging. We quickly grew to love it – and made it our personal mission not to lose the ball!
Hold on tight, because when Radial 50 hits the App Store we foresee quite a following. We’d love to see what Roundthird has in store for this game and others in the near future. Keep watching the App Store because this is one you won’t want to miss.
