Gravity Badgers

You choose a direction and power level to launch your badger; then witness what happens. The aim of each level is to reach the warp point, but you are awarded up to 3 stars based on your performance. So the actual aim is to collect the 3 energy cores and reach the warp in one shot. You have 3 attempts, each one deducts a star. So if you collect 3 energy cores and hit the warp, then you get 3 stars. If you obtain 3 energy cores and do it in 2 attempts, then you get 2 stars. It’s not really a great system because you know you really need all 3 in one attempt, and there’s nothing stopping you restarting the level after every attempt.

I thought the tutorial was poorly done because it shows you each concept one by one, so within minutes you have seen all the game’s concepts. Usually games will show you one concept then test your knowledge of it, then introduce another; gradually adding new concepts to make the game interesting and more challenging over time.

A level may have several objects. Red planets have gravity that pulls you towards them, and blue planets push you away; these are used to arc your trajectory. There’s pipes which change your direction at right-angles. There’s static and moving obstacles. There’s gates that you must pass through to uncover the exit. Ice blocks that hold you and allow you to launch in any direction you want.

When you have completed the tutorial, the majority of levels in the first half of the game are all solved the same way. Pull back as far as you can and launch your badger towards the first orb. Many levels I didn’t even look at what was on screen; I just pulled back and aimed at the first core.

The difficulty is all over the place in general. Many require a bit of thought and some require a bit of trial and error, but then there’s plenty that are simply “full power, aim for first orb”. I expected a better difficulty balance in the final batch of levels but many of these were also easy. When you design a game such as this, I would have thought you would create many levels, play-test them, assign a difficulty to them, then place them in a reasonable order. This game seems to have no thought put into it.

There’s a boss battle as the last level in each section. The aim of the boss battles is just to avoid laser fire as your badger auto shoots back. Some are just recycled from earlier bosses. Even the end boss has recycled content. There was one recycled boss that had many more objects on screen so it looked harder, but I just used the same tactic as the earlier boss and stayed on the left side. It was easier to defeat because I had experience with the previous one.

The game is clearly designed for mobile devices rather than the PC. So it’s one of those games where you have to learn what the icons mean, because there is no text explaining them.

The game is obviously going to be compared to Angry Birds in Space, and maybe it was inspired by it. Angry Birds has you firing multiple, and different birds (different properties) to wipe out targets. This led to a lot of thought and sometimes different ways to complete the level. The way this game is, it basically has one solution. If there are multiple solutions, then you end up cutting corners for fewer stars.