Massteroid Review

It’s Armageddon and there’s nothing we can do to stop it! In fact, players are encouraged to make things worse for our little blue marble. Massteroid is all about guiding a space rock as it plummets toward Earth; gathering up more bits and pieces along the way while avoiding pesky human countermeasures. It’s not terribly complex, but it’s fun enough in small doses and offers quite a few modes to tide players over.

Massteroid can be easily likened to Katamari Damacy in space. As players duck and dodge through Earth’s atmosphere gathering up debris and avoiding explosives it’s rather hard not to draw such a parallel. Of course it’s still quite different, what with scores determining how much of the planet is destroyed and how high the body count is, but the basic mass-building idea is familiar. There are three different control schemes to pick from (tilt, tap, and drag), as well as three different difficulties for the main game mode that each offer a different experience in terms of quantity and intensity. Then there are the extra modes: Sudden Death, Gourmet, and Infinite. Honestly any of these could be their own game, and having all of them available like this is a real treat.

The main mode in Massteroid is a fun, albeit brief, distraction. However, the extra stuff really steals the show. Specifically Gourmet. Endless ensures that players will never really run out of content and Sudden Death is a decent challenge, but having to collect pizza toppings as the pie falls from space towards a -I can only assume - very large Italian stereotype's face is as entertaining as it is ridiculous.

However the core mechanics, even with all the extra content, might not be enough to satisfy everyone. It’s also a shame that for as varied as the options are, the controls can still be problematic. Tapping is too loose and unresponsive, tilting never feels quite right even after fiddling with the sensitivity, and dragging obstructs the screen too much. It’s still playable regardless, but no one method feels entirely polished.

Even so, Massteroid is a weird and entertaining arcade-style timesink. It probably won’t tide players over for lengthy periods of time, but it’s plenty of simple fun for a few minutes at a time.