Bitosphere Reviews

Cute little micro-game. Has some nice graphics and (one) little comfy music loop, but is otherwise a bit lacking both in gameplay depth and replayability. Also has several bugs. There is no pause button or options menu. The “How to Play” menu has a small visual bug, with the music-alien not having the white outline around it, making it look weird compared to the other astronauts. The game has some minor translation issues, made or translated by someone with English as a second language, causing only very minor confusion. The game has a view over four planets in a line, with a spaceship that flies across the top or bottom of the screen. The spaceship then drops one member of each of the four alien races, each corresponding to one planet, which you must click and drag to the planet to rescue them before they succumb to the vacuum of space. Saving an astronaut grants you one OMR, where as if one dies (or if an alien invader spaceship hits a planet), you lose 1 OMR. This is where the first issue comes up- as each turret costs 20 OMR and you only gain 4 for perfect play. It takes five rocket trips, or about 30 seconds or so, to get enough OMR to build even one turret. As the only upgrade or choice you can make beyond sending astronauts to the right planet and clicking the bad-guy ships, this is very shallow and doesn't give you much decision making. The rocket also always drops of the astronauts in the same order on their two trips- I noticed the human was always spat out first on the top of the screen trip, and the human was spat out last on the bottom of the screen trip. This never changes or alters; and each trip always has one of each of the alien races coming out, meaning there is no randomness or having to think on your feet. While this would make the gameplay very slow; I did actually manage to get hundreds of OMR by spam-clicking on the spaceship itself. This is an intentional mechanic- as it says so in the “How to Play” screen. I find this decision baffling. You can generate hundreds of OMR by clicking on the little spaceship, but actually dragging the astronauts to the planets which takes seconds longer and penalizes you if you drag it to the wrong planet? It's a slower and less effective way to make money. You don't even lose lives from them dying in space; playing the game optimally would be ignoring the astronauts completely. This is further compounded by the fact that the bad guy aliens only come in from the top side of the screen, which is the only side you can build your turrets on, further limiting the amount of gameplay you can get out of this game. Your loss condition is as follows; take a certain number of hits from bad guys, OR let your OMR reach the negatives by allowing an astronaut to die when you have zero OMR. Normally, in an endless survival game or puzzle game like Tetris, the game would get harder over time to eventually force the player to lose. In this game however, the aliens do get faster- but ONLY if collect and hoard OMR. I noticed that when trying to get enough OMR to build a turret on all the planets at once; the spaceships started to get really fast and hard to click. But after spending all my OMR again, they got slow as the start of the game. This means theoretically you could play the game forever without ever losing, but without a time or astronaut related metric, your “high score” would never be more then your most collected amount of money, which is either painfully slow to collect (not clicking the spaceship), or trivially easy to rack up (by spamming the spaceship). Finally; the turrets are very strong and one turret placed on any planet can defend all four (the game says they're overpowered itself); but strangely you can choose which planet to build it on despite it having no difference. Also, there appears to be a sort of bug where you can “double place” the same turret on the same planet twice in rapid succession, as I noticed my OMR going down by 40 instead of 20 which is the cost of a turret. Because there are no attack waves, bosses, and the game doesn't get more difficult over time (actually easier, when you spend your OMR)- building a TEMPORARY turret didn't feel like it was accomplishing anything other then giving me a chance to put away all the astronauts to safety. If the lives of the astronauts mattered in any way, then I could see the value of this upgrade, but since they don't and aren't even related to your loss condition, it feels utterly pointless. In conclusion, I understand what this game is going for. It's a simple little tower-defense game with a small scope. It isn't trying to be a massive Roguelike or an insane arcade experience. However, the game doesn't do anything with what its trying to do and all of its features feel tacked on and pointless together. This is a minigame that belongs on a web browser or a time waster for another, larger project- on its own it is lackluster. The fact it's a small, budget experience doesn't excuse it of lacking any kind of thought or even playtesting put into it. While playing the game, I instantly thought of ways it could be improved. Instead of turrets, why not have shields around each planet that could protect that planet from aliens, but also prevent you from rescuing astronauts there until you get a chance to lower it? Instead of temporary turrets, why not have permanent defenses with the bad aliens getting faster and more frequent attacks as the game goes on? Why not have saving the astronauts being the best way to make money, and clicking the ship only grants a small bonus, with each astronaut giving say 10 or 20 OMR each, with turrets adjusted in price accordingly, so you actually feel rewarded getting them back home? This one is a bit undercooked. I haven't tried any of the other developer's games, but I will say I hope they keep working on their game development hobby and hopefully don't abandon their games in a poor state before they can polish them up into something nice. I won't be refunding the game, but I will simply recommend to not buy it unless it gets some more love and care put into it.