Gamer reviews for Satellina

Get Swept Away In Satellina

Did you ever play the game "Operation" as a kid and think to yourself, “Gee, this activity would be perfect if only it swirled in dizzying circles, made the satisfying sounds of bubbles popping and occasionally seemed impossible?” If you did, then congratulations! Satellina is exactly what your life has been missing.

Released for the Apple App Store on January 22, 2015 and to Android's Google Play Store on January 29th, Satellina is the first game released by Moon Kid, a new name in indie gaming headed up by developer Peter Smith.

The game costs $1.99 on the App Store and is being featured as one of the “Best New Games.” The lack of in-game purchases or annoying pop-up ads makes the cost of the game reasonable. The game is rated for ages 4+ and while a four year old could definitely try to play this game, the preschool age group is not its target audience. The game is small, only 40 MB and can be played on those ancient Apple devices still running iOS 4.0, although it is optimized for the iPhone 5.

Gameplay is simple: jam out to techno music while using a swirling white pointer on a black background, to touch only the green circles (or the blue circles in the two alternate color schemes). After the first set of green circles is cleared, one of the pattern’s other circles will become the target color until the screen is empty and an intense feeling of accomplishment is achieved. The game is broken up into ten levels, labelled A-J. Each of the ten levels has five stages of increasing difficulty.

In order to progress through the game, each level must be completed in two minutes and thirty seconds or less. Touch the wrong color? No problem! The only penalty is losing time and restarting the stage to try again. Finishing all ten levels in under two and a half minutes, awards the player a bonus level. The bonus level, entitled “Grand Tour,” requires the player to complete all ten game levels back to back in less than fifteen minutes.

The initial gameplay goes by pretty quickly with some levels not even requiring a restart to perfect and just the fact that the bonus level allows for the entire game to be completed in fifteen minutes says something about the longevity of the game. The replay value in this game is all in the online leaderboards. Feel good about finishing the first level in under two minutes? You won’t after checking out the leaderboard. The wizard in the #1 spot cleared the level in 12 seconds. 12. Seconds.

The game is still pretty new, so I wasn’t surprised when I experienced a few bumps on my play through. Finishing a level occasionally caused the game to force close as did paging through the leader boards and receiving a text as I was finishing a stage. The game automatically pauses if the phone is put to sleep or if you get a phone call during a level, which is a nice feature and the crash following level completion did not delete my progress.

All in all, the game is a great way to squeeze some satisfying puzzle solving into your day as quickly as possible.