Review: Meteor
Score:
89%
Version Reviewed: 2
Buy Link | Download / Information Link
Yes, yes, I know hardened gamers will be saying it's just another Breakout/Arkanoid clone, but Meteor deserves to be given a second look however jaded you feel the genre has become. Why? Because it's almost perfect.
The idea, of course, is to waggle your bat from side to side, keeping a bouncing ball in the playing area so that it can knock out bricks in the main wall. When you've knocked them all out, it's onto the next level. Except that this is set in space. And the bat is a spaceship, which can be extended and enabled for missile-launching. And the ball can be made super hot so that it knocks out several bricks at once, or even split into three balls, all following their own paths. And the bricks are of dozens of different varieties, from dumb tiles to exploding ones, to all manner of power-ups (extra lives, larger bats, enabling the different ball types, etc.) And you get enemy spaceships which wander across (and up and down) the screen, firing missiles at you.
So, er..... rather more exciting than Breakout then! The extra features are introduced gradually, so that you get to learn what everything does, and after a couple of hours gameplay I was still spotting things I hadn't seen before.
The graphics flow smoothly, the speed of balls and bat movement is judged to perfection and it's really very difficult to see how the genre could br further improved. Most of all, Meteor's fun, which after all is the point of the exercise.
I haven't mentioned sound effects because at the time of writing they don't work on my Nokia 6630 (all other devices are apparently fine). But unless you want those around you to be annoyed by bleeping noises and explosions, you'll (if you're anything like me) keep the sound turned off anyway.
When restarting the game, there's an option to resume from the last point you got to (without running out of lives), a nice touch given that games can last for an hour or so if you're any good. A tip: If you need to switch away from the game for any reason, be sure to pause it first, otherwise the game will carry on in the background and you'll lose that life.
Interestingly, there's also a 'landscape' mode version, available from the developers (version 1), if you're a real gaming nut and want maximum screen area. The trial version lets you play three or four levels and gives a good flavour of what's on offer and of the good things to come.
Highly recommended. This one's a keeper on my smartphone.
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at