Moonz

One thing that amazes me about iPhone app developers is their unique ability to create a game that is so simple, yet so absolutely frustrating to the point I become filled with an insatiable desire to cause pain and misery to those around me. What can I say? I’m a gluten for pain. The good folks ADXSoft, developers of Moonz are really, really good at this.

Every once in a while one of those games creeps up and you just want to beat the crap out of it, and then the next time you wanna beat even more crap out of it, like when your team plays the Lakers.

Moonz is definitely one of those games.

The concept of Moonz is ridiculously simple. Throw stuff. You’re given a variety of items, including cows, double decker buses, toilets, cheese, and asteroids to throw into orbit around Earth, The International Space Station, Mars, or Rigel 9... Whatever that is. Oh, and make sure none of these items hit each other. That’s pretty much it. While the formula is pretty simple, it actually makes for a more than average gaming experience. It’s easy to play, but darn near impossible to perfect. And for whatever reason I felt the need to just keep playing.

Moonz allows for one and two player action, with four game modes in each. Single player includes Time Trial, Sudden Death, Bunny Defender, and Sandbox. In Time Trial, you will score as many points as possible in one, three, five, or ten minutes. Sudden Death has you throwing as many objects as possible into orbit without having any of them crash. This was my favorite game mode as it proved the most challenging. Bunny Defender is kind of a wild card, having you tap on falling objects before they crash to the ground, grinding your bunnies into bits of bone, blood and brains. Why ADXSoft felt the need to mercilessly slaughter all these poor bunnies I’ll never know. Sandbox is basically a free play mode, letting you create your own little map and hurl around as many items as you want.

The first two gameplay modes are pretty fun, and like I said sudden death is the better of the two modes. The first one just doesn’t seem all that challenging compared to Sudden Death after a bit of practice. The last two game modes were really just thrown in there because they could. Sandbox is cool for about 2 minutes and then you realize that there is no point. Bunny Defender is okay besides the fact that the controls are totally whacked. Sometimes you can destroy two objects close together in one touch, and sometimes one of them just seems to avoid destruction and head on it’s merry little way towards some fluffy bunny carnage. A lot of the objects threatening the life of your precious bunnies will float off of the side of the screen with only a small sliver sticking out which becomes basically impossible to push, leaving you screaming in slow motion while your poor furry friends await a miserable fate in space where nary a soul can hear them scream. I put my thumb through my screen multiple times trying to get this slippery little projectiles.

The control issues are not simply limited to the gameplay in Bunny Defender, but that’s where most of it comes into play. There are a couple of issues in the other game mode when trying to launch an object into orbit. It’s really hard to get the feel of just how hard to flick, or where to let go. Even with this minor problem considered, the meat of the gameplay is still pretty solid.

There are also four, two player modes thrown into Moonz which suffer from some of the same flaws as the single player modes. A couple of them feel like they were thrown in for the sake of simply having more variety. All four modes might work if it wasn’t for the fact that two player had to be played on one phone. Multi player via wi-fi or peer-to-peer multi player would have made the two player modes much more bearable. Moonz is just a little bit too fast paced paced for two players to be playing on the same phone. In the end it’s this fact that pretty much ruins the two player action for Moonz, though I have to say it’s worth giving it a try.

Moonz is a solid game, and while you won’t be overwhelmed with value or variety for $4.99, I have to say it’s worth the buy. I enjoyed playing it and it will probably spend a good amount of time on my iPhone. Moonz is the type of game I would pick up and play while waiting to get into the doctors office, or on my break at work. It’s definitely worth that. It’s gameplay is addictive, and it’s certainly visually appealing. Since Moonz will expectedly appeal to the masses of iPhone users, I would expect it to hit the top 25 or at least the top 50. If not for the addictive gameplay, at least for the exploding bunnies.