If you’ve had enough of stacking ice cream Scoops (frankly we don’t see why anyone would get tired of it), try Ian’s newest game where you have to avoid items instead of stacking them.

Kyper ($0.99)

Ian is back to his Scoops roots after the successful and totally addicting wordgame: Textropolis. This time, he goes a full 180 and switches things up a bit. We got used to Scoops (in all of it’s pastel glory) stacking ice cream scoops and avoiding those darn onions and tomatoes. In Kyper, you pilot the Star Kyper (that’s a name we gave, it’s boring but deal with it ;p) and dodge the asteroids. Speed picks up as you go farther, how long will YOU last?

Design

In usual, Ian Marsh fashion. Kyper speaks off elegant design and polish. Take a look at his global scores and help pages:

The design should be somewhat reminiscent of Space Ninja and Blue Attack/Defense. It’s not entirely using vector graphics, but it does seem to use little touches of it here and there. Regardless of what the design is called, the black, yellow and orange colors blend perfectly to give Kyper it’s unique tone.

Gameplay

If you have great eyes and can read the text on the help page above, congrats. For those that can’t, Kyper should test your ninja reflexes as you avoid orange asteroids and get close enough to yellow asteroids without actually hitting them. We can imagine what the Kyper drawing board sounded like. Ian probably wanted a game where you avoid objects and try to go the fastest. He then thought that would be too simple so he added some sort of slow down/boost system that complicates the game a little bit.

Orange asteroids slow you down while yellow asteroids make you faster. There are little asteroid tickers/trackers by your speed indicator to alert you which color and where they’re coming from. Speed slow downs/boosts are calculated off of Star Kyper’s distance away/closeness to the asteroids.5

Speed picks up as get farther in the game. Multiple asteroids of both color variations zoom by and you try to achieve to stay alive and the fastest speed you can go. One second of lost focus leads to this:

Star Kyper explodes then you’ll be asked to input your name for the high scores. That’s if you scored enough to join the elite 10:

Conclusion

Kyper is another excellent pick and play game from Ian Marsh. We should really get used to it by now. The gameplay is rather simple, but we think Ian Marsh has developed his own “brand” for the store that anything he touches turns to gold. We could not blame him though for achieving where he’s at now. He maintains four of the most clearly polished and well executed games on the store. Also, he always seem to add little things here and there on every game. He added a little stats page this time that shows average time, distance and speed among other things.

The only thing we can really suggest is to possibly change asteroid shapes and color as you get farther in the game so there’s something more to look forward to, to keep you playing. Maybe after you reach 500 km/s you get triangles and red and blue colored asteroids. It adds a freshness factor to the game as you progress plus an added difficulty to the game.

Also, maybe he could do a multiplayer game where you fight off Star Kypers and see which ship holds the longest. Have them battle like air hockeys but instead have them avoid each other which leads us to another idea: have the ship get off of it’s stationary rail and give it the ability to roam around the whole screen.

Overall, for a $0.99 cents game, we could not ask for more. It’s just done with great execution that makes a simple gameplay all worth while.