Game Info
GAME NAME: Satellina
DEVELOPER(S): Moon Kid
PUBLISHER(S): Moon Kid
PLATFORM(S): iOS(Reviewed), Android
GENRE(S): Puzzle Motion
RELEASE DATE(S): January 22, 2015
I’m not much of a mobile gamer, I normally stick to consoles and the PC. However, I always have my phone and iPad on me for work and when the opportunity came up to review Moon Kid’s title Satellina, I jumped at it. It’s a puzzle in motion and that is what intrigued me.
The over world layout is a pyramid by design with circles A-J, which is like a world if you will. In each Letter World there are 5 levels that flow into each other. Everything is timed. The goal is to complete each level as quickly as you can without messing up.
In Satellina, gameplay works this way. There are various moving patterns. Within each pattern, there are colored circles of green, yellow, and red particles that move around the screen and sync with the well composed synth-pop soundtrack. The music is pretty up beat and fantastic, it will keep you in the zone. The objective is deceptively simple yet addictive: drag your finger to collect only the green particles without bumping into yellow or red. When you’ve cleared all the green particles, yellow particles turn green and red particles turn yellow. Clear them all to complete the level, if you bump into the wrong color, you’ll have to start over. This is where the challenge is. You can manage the cursor in two different ways, directly touch it and move around. This is hard because you can’t always see angles. The other option is to touch a few centimeters below it to add space so you can see where you are dragging, this helped me out greatly and I achieved quicker timings this way.
How to play
The graphics are poppy, bright and very clean, which makes Satellina fun to play. You have a few options in the game, you can set your drag speed, change colors within the game, play music and clear your saved data. One of the coolest facets is the world leaderboard. Satellina is highly addictive due to the challenge nature of it all. Once you complete a world you can see your records compared to the leaderboard and see what place you rank in. Naturally you want to do better and beat people. There is offline play but you need to be online in order to have your scores sync to the leaderboard.
After the game’s initial announcement, based on some feedback Moon Kid received from people with red/green colorblindness, Satellina’s developer has added an alternate, colorblind-friendly palette to the game. I think this was pretty awesome of them to do. I don’t have any gripes with this game other than I wish there were more levels or some DLC content for the future. It would also be nice to save your score in offline mode and have them sync automatically when you’re back online. When I was traveling and in the air I noticed that any score I got didn’t really count towards leaderboard scores which was disappointing.
Satellina will sell for $1.99 / £1.49 on the App Store. The Android version will follow on Google Play on January 29.
The Recommendation
If you crave a new mobile or tablet game then I highly recommend Satellina. For $1.99 you can’t go wrong. You get a really fun game that holds a ton of replay value.
Download in iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id951178649 Google Play: Coming Jan 29th.
