In this tilt-controlled puzzler, you’ll be playing the part of Kozmic, a blue ball (go ahead, laugh it up) on a mission to rescue his Little Blues. Getting the ball rolling is easy enough, but you do have to watch out for laser turrets, evil cubes and other nasty hazards along the way. Surely you didn’t think a rescue mission would be easy?
Things start out easy enough, with stages that can be cleared in 20 seconds or less. So far, so good. Nothing to worry about. It isn’t long before the game decides to put on a mean streak, however. Electric beams that temporarily paralyze Kozmic, coloured cubes that injure the poor thing upon contact (some of which even give chase) and turrets all make navigating this obstacle course quite dangerous. Throw in a bunch of coloured doors, each with – you’ve guessed it – a corresponding key and the whole thing becomes quite a head-scratcher. Oh, and your health is finite.
While the difficulty never got downright brutal, some levels did still feel more tricky than they should have been. This was in no small part due to how far the game zooms in, leaving you with a very limited view of your surroundings, never knowing exactly where to go; unless you’ve taken to memorizing the lay of the land that is. You’ll see what I mean once you reach the point where travelling outside the ‘box’ becomes a thing… if not sooner.
Completing a stage gives you a rating between one and three stars, based on various factors such as completion time, gems collected and damage sustained. In its current form, and I hope this never changes, you don’t need a specific number of stars to progress. I’m sure completionists are going to be replaying stages over and over until that elusive ‘perfect run’ has been accomplished. Meanwhile, I was quite content with simply finishing the lot.
Adding to the short list of issues, in spite of it still being in the alpha stage of development, is the physics. For some odd reason, it felt more like I was shifting my weight from one leg to the other, and not actually tilting the screen. Momentum and acceleration both seemed to work fine, but rocking the world back and forth… seemed off somehow.
Then again, alpha is alpha, and the developer likely has this on his to-do list already. So with that in mind, go ahead, take Kozmic Blue for a spin (get it?) – won’t cost you a single cent after all. Time to get this ball rolling!
