Planet Defense (Game Review)

I love space games. Any kind of space game. I'll always love 'em. So shoot me! (But do it with a freeze ray or something classic.) A game with the name of Planet Defense brings up images of early classic Defender or maybe Space Invaders.

But it was not meant to be. The theme of planet defense is here, but the actual game is a very familiar one with cool art. Maybe that's okay. I'm willing to be fooled ... sometimes.

Nice art, Codewalla. Great name, also. I like the little guy holding the ray gun. Ray guns are cool! ZAP!!!

But when I press Play, I get this:

A guy is on a planet (hiding behind the Play button -- not a good choice, because we want to see our little alien blaster). There are levels and scores, and ... what's that, a row of balls at the top? Looks familiar. When I press Play, I get this.

Not Defender, but Bubble Shooter! The red ball in blue alien boy's blaster needs to match at least two other balls of the same color. When it does, the balls disappear. You shoot by tapping the screen where you want to the balls to shoot out of the blaster, so you get to see alien boy's arm move back and forth as you aim the gun and shoot (one tap total).

This is also cool because while you are deciding where to shoot, colorful 50's rocket ships are flying around as pure distraction. You can see an orange one to the alien's left.

The three buttons on the left let you see Help, allow you to Pause, or mute the music. The music didn't seem to be working, however, but I'll survive when the rest of the game is so perfect. This is a bubble shooter, but more fun than most because of the art and theme. My favorite kind of bubble shooter is called bubble spinner, where the balls are clumped in the center and every shot rotates the clump so you get a way to move the clump. But all bubble shooters have a time limit and so does Planet Defense.

When your time runs out, a giant flying saucer starts coming down. You can see that little blue arc at the top in the shot above, but it gets bigger:

Look out, it's moving down. Shoot faster (and look at that cool blue classic space ship to the shooter's left). Look out, look out!

I'm doomed!

Game over, man!

I love this game and it stays on my ZTE Open (even though I'm running out of memory with all the programs I'm writing and/or uploading).

This is just a perfect game for the Firefox OS phone. Simple, fun, and takes an old game and makes it fun with new cool art. Way to go, Codewalla! The music didn't seem to work, but that's minor and music is tough on HTML5 (sounds like a future blog programming post).

Cost: Free

Genre: Arcade
Score: 5 (out of 5)
Tested on: ZTE Open (Firefox OS)
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace