G, a new physics-based space puzzler by Soma Games, has rocketed into the app store nearly undetected. With its beautifully hand-drawn art and meditative musical arrangements, it looks gorgeous and plays quite well for a first effort.
The premise of G involves a mysterious cloud that approaches our planet. This cloud, known as The Rain, offers the possibility of great wealth if its resources can be harnessed. Several companies and mercenaries are embarking upon treks to explore the unique properties of The Rain. Your task is to join one of these companies and successfully map The Rain by pinging specific areas with rockets.
In order to complete this task, you must find the proper balance of trajectory, launch impulse, and burn duration. When you’ve found the proper balance, your rocket should pass close enough to the targets to ping them by releasing a sonar burst whose radius must touch the target, turning it from red to green. Ping all targets to move on to the next level. There are 49 levels, with a bonus 50th level. The early levels are fairly simple, with few obstacles to hinder your mission. As you progress, you will have to deal with gravitational pull, iceteroids, quicksand clouds, and more. The fewer rockets it takes to complete your mission, the better your score and the more money you earn for your chosen company. Latter stages even utilize multi-stage rocketry, whereby you must preset the direction, impulse, and burn for each stage, then initiate each at the appropriate time during the single flight of the rocket.
Soma Games clearly spent a lot of effort to make this a visually spectacular game. The music also adds a cool, earthy element to the game. G mostly utilizes touch controls, as you drag sliders and aiming arrows. The rocket launch and sonar pings are also controlled through touch controls. You can alter the direction that the rocket points through the accelerometer, as well as cut short a flight by shaking your iDevice. There is a bit of a learning curve to overcome, but a little practice should have you hitting your targets in no time.
We did find a few issues with G that bothered us. On our initial playthrough, the graphics failed during the tutorial, giving us a nearly black screen instead of the flight control screen. A restart fixed this, but we nearly deleted the game from the get-go. The tutorials, though extensive and helpful, lack some sort of skip functionality. When we resumed play, we had to sit through the same tutorial screens that played previously, which was very frustrating. Slider functionality is not as smooth as hoped, either. We also felt that once a rocket sailed past its targets with no hope of affecting them anymore, it took too long for the rocket to reach the cutoff point where the game ended the flight and moved on to the next rocket. Of course, we could shake the device to cut it short, but we felt that the game should generally recognize this “lost cause” and take care of it for us.
Despite these control flaws, this is still a solid little game. Soma Games has addressed several glitches already and will undoubtedly strive to perfect these issues, as G is the first in an expected series of three games. At $3.99, the price feels a bit steep and may be contributing to its lack of attention by gamers. A price point of $1.99 would likely launch this title into the stratosphere. With nothing quite like it in the app store, G is carving out quite a little niche. Soma Games’ efforts are rewarded with a solid 4-Dimple rating.
G gets our AppSmile 4-Dimple rating:
Video by somagames
