Crunchy Planets is a fantastic new fast-paced survival game from Oniric Games . Playing as a sci-fi eat-em-up thriller, Crunchy Planets has all the pizzazz, excitement, and one-more-try elements of Doodle Jump without being a boring wannabe clone.
Crunchy Planets Pros:
- Beautiful one-more-try quality
- Fantastic graphics and chomping sounds
- Numerous power-ups
- A total blast to play
Crunchy Planets Cons:
- Control sensitivity slightly touchy
The premise of Crunchy Planets is to do just that, crunch, munch, chomp, and otherwise devour dead planets while avoiding inhabited ones. The main character is a hilarious-looking alien with a brainless stare and apparently no destination. Tilting the iDevice left-right and up-down directs him toward what could be his last crunch. Eating variously sized planets awards varying point values. The best scoring method, though, is to shoot for the available multipliers. Eating planets quickly grants points multiplied by the number of successive planets eaten. For example, eating seven planets in a row will boost the sixth one to six times its nominal point value, the seventh to seven times its value, and so forth. Most of the planets are of the small yellow sort, but larger blue and green types are plentiful and can substantially boost your score if the multiplier is timed right. We found a good method is to eat tons of lower-point yellow globes to boost your multiplier and then swallow down the valuable bigger ones. Eating an inhabited planet, identifiable with a visible cityscape, or a black hole ends the game. Black holes will try to suck you in, so watch out! As you progress for a while in the game, planets with cannons begin to appear. These shoot homing missiles that will follow your alien for a short time. If hit, your goose is cooked!
Another aspect that makes Crunch Planets such a great title is a generous use of power-ups. As your little extraterrestrial is devouring the universe, he’ll come across magnet, shield, and ghost icons. Each delivers a boost that keeps him active in his eating-spree. The magnet power-up is especially fun as it delivers a cool animation of all the planets getting sucked into the alien’s mouth. Along the way you’ll also come across glowing blue orbs. Collect three of these to engage Feast mode. Feast mode scales the hero to about three times his normal size and enables his to eat anything at a super fast rate.
The artwork in Crunchy Planets is a blast. The planets and characters are rendered in vivid colors with thick outlines. The crunching sound effects are amusing and bring an additional level of endearment to the character. No soundtrack is present, but you can play your iPod music. Controls are all well implemented. One control scheme exists, tiling the device in the direction of desired travel, but you can set the device orientation to portrait or landscape. Each works well.
Crunchy Planets sports a Score and Stats page where you can study your planet-eating habits as well as browse local and global score boards. Twitter and Facebook connectivity are available for sharing scores with friends. It’s all very familiar to Doodle Jump, but this is no lame clone, simply a game Doodle Jumpers will want to add to their collection. We can’t wait to see what Oniric Games has up their sleeve for future updates. Personally, we would love to see a tap-to-shoot power-up. In its initial release-state, the $0.99 Crunchy Planets has all the makings of an App Store chart climber! We give it 5-Dimples.
