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PSM Quick Play: Crash Planets & Cosmic Clean-up

Posted by Chris K on December 19th, 2012 | 0 Comments | Tags: Cosmic Clean-Up , Crash Planets , quick play

‘PSM Quick Play‘ are impressions from newly released PlayStation Mobile titles and are based on roughly 45 minutes or more of playtime. Full reviews are available at a later date.

Crash Planets

$0.99 – Tested on PlayStation Vita (Game was purchased)

Crash Planets is the first of hopefully many games released on PlayStation Mobile by someone using the open SDK. That is right, Crash Planets is not by a developer that was hand picked by Sony but just a guy got a license to release his content on the Store. That being said, it doesn’t make a great first impression for the service.

Crash Planets is a fairly simple game where you control a planet and you have to destroy other planets on the screen. You do this by crashing into each other. The planet who had a faster speed will damage the other and you continue doing this until you are the sole survivor. The problem here is that the game just isn’t really fun.

First we have the controls. I think this game is pretty much unplayable if you are using just touch. The touch control work by touching the screen and the planet will move toward the point you touch. So since the planets are moving all around, you will be touch like you are playing wack-a-mole. The analog stick perform a little better but it still feels way too loose.

But the biggest issue with the game is its stability. As of writing this it has crashed on me just over 10 times on my Vita. It seems to happen on Stage 10, which looks like it is a boss fight. After losing it seems to randomly throw an error and boot me out of the game. This would be fine if you could select levels, but you have to start at the beginning each time. It is a real pain.

There is some local multiplayer included, but there is no score keeping so you will probably get bored of it after a few games. If the game is patched it might be worth a try, but for now I would save your dollar for something else.

Hot:

• It is priced right
• Multiplayer would be fun…

Not:

• if it kept score
• Lots of crashing
• Almost unplayable with touch controls
• No way to get to later levels fast

Cosmic Clean-up

$1.29 – Tested on PlayStation Vita (Game was purchased)

Cosmic Clean-up is the second PlayStation Mobile game from the partnership of Ripstone and Green Hill Games. In Cosmic Clean-up it is your goal to clean up space debris making it a safer place for you and me.

You are in control of a small spacecraft that when launched has an endless supply of rocket fuel. You need to use those ever-firing boosters to burn up all of the space debris in each stage. The game has touch controls, where touching the left side of the screen makes the ship rotate in that direction while touching the right does the opposite.

I do wish there was the option for using the sticks, but you can get around just fine… after a bit of time playing around with it. One thing I do really like are the games power-ups. They can be found randomly in the stages, or are dropped some times when you are done incinerating some debris. There are three that I have found so far, a stronger more powerful rocket which burns up objects faster, an invincibility shield that allows you to run into the debris without exploding, and one that combines those two into one space debris wrecking machine.

Stages are set-up in much the same fashion. You will have to navigate around using some on-screen arrows to alert you to where space debris might be hiding. One problem I found though is on larger stages these arrows seems to disappear when the distance between you and the debris is very far. It can make for some stages to take way longer than you think they should.

But Cosmic Clean-up does offer up a great bit up fun once you get a hang of the game’s quirks. In no time at all you will be blazing around burning up satellites and asteroids like nobody’s business.

Hot:

• Fun core concept
• Great for pick-up and play gaming
• Love the power-ups

Not:

• Wish the “radar” would be visible at all times
• A small bit of slow down when destroying big objects
• Wish the game offered more than touch controls

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