Space Ark Review

The most fun you'll have scoring points on Xbox Live Arcade this year.

If there’s one thing Indie developers seem to know better than mainstream game makers, it’s how to make a highly addictive game from a very simple idea. This is something that Space Ark proves beyond any doubt. Make no mistake – this game might keep you up well into the early hours.

It’s a deceptively childlike setup – a black hole has torn up several planets deep in space and only a group of fearless animals explorers known as ‘Arkonauts’ can save them. The aim is to bounce an Arkonaut on a trampoline pad and collect DNA crystals to complete the level. Adding to that is the additional challenge of trying to collect the DNA in a combo chain to meet a certain quota. Once this target is reached, the area will become successfully terraformed, allowing new life to begin to grow. On top of this is the game’s utterly bonkers score meter, one that allows for scores to reach into the hundreds of millions and an assortment of weapons and shields to help grab all the DNA.

While the game’s graphics, storyline and promotional material might scream ‘kid-friendly’, the game itself is probably one of the most hardcore score-based challenges you could ever hope to find. Simply bouncing around and grabbing coloured gems is only one tiny part of what the game is about – before you know it, you’ll be blasting through worlds and revisiting them as soon as you can to try and reach a better score. It’s fun, fast and incredibly furious.

What makes it so enjoyable is how easy it is to play. The left analogue moves the pad, the right moves the Arkonaut. While at first it’ll make your head spin, once you’ve mastered it, you can have the Arkonaut bouncing like crazy on any of the other bouncy object (clouds, bumpers, etc), while the pad simply shoots left and right collecting all the falling goodies. The result is vibrant madness, a rain of colours and craziness of so many kinds, but you’ll always have that little voice in the back of your head that whispers quietly, ‘this is a good thing!’.

Getting a high score depends on a number of things. If you collect between three and fifteen DNA blocks in a row, you’ll earn a piece of fruit. Each of the fruit is worth a different amount, so the more you combo, the higher the prize. The fruits count towards raising your score multiplier from a lower x1 to a staggering x20 and even beyond. Complicating matters further is the fact that there are four different types of DNA blocks, each one of which is worth more than the last. So you not only have to think about your score and the combo chains, but about which set of blocks to clear through first. Completing a level without missing anything or dropping the Arkonaut gives you a ‘perfect’ score bonus, which can see your score ascending into the millions in just one level. It’s completely mad and utterly incredible.

There are also power-ups dotted around each level, such as shields to prevent your Arkonaut from missing the pad and losing a life and a machine gun to clear out the DNA blocks in super quick time. All the power-ups add to the existing craziness of the game and the result is a rainbow of eye-pleasing colours that can boggle the mind and entertain in equal measure.