Sure there are enough games to occupy our free time just by looking around, but in some cases, we’d have to stretch far out, even beyond Earth…

Space Miner: Space Ore Bust ($1.99 – On Sale)

Space Miner is a very strong first iPhone showing by Venan Entertainment. It successfully combines RPG elements, great graphics, humor and addicting gameplay onto one game on a fast track in becoming a new iPhone classic.

Presentation

The game is literally taking the world famous Apple desktop default wallpapers and animating them. The game has a lot of purple and pink shades in ‘em with fog and other crazy elements added to the later levels which are just beautiful.

However, beyond the graphical and sound elements to Space Miner, the spotlight should really be focused on its interesting and ridiculously weird but humorous storytelling and dialogues. Basically, you’re helping your uncle out of debt through space mining, the rest you’d just have to find out as I’m not spoiling.

Controls

You get a directional dpad on the left and two buttons to the right. The one with the arrow forward is for accelerating while the other is for shooting. The game could’ve used a dual stick controls but I’d like that it isn’t since it makes for a whole new experience.

Gameplay

The game’s sounds and overall presentation makes you think of Cowboys and the Jetsons. Just wait til you hear the story as the ruckus grows and it becomes even more hilarious. Regardless of the story progression, there are two main goals: mining and upgrading your ship.

Space Miner starts you off with a fairly powerful ship good to conquer and mine the first two levels. For the first two levels you have two goals: mine rocks and pick up space dust for $$$ AND collect space buoys to unlock new levels.

Space Miner either automatically tells you to go back to base since your ship is full of space dust OR tap on pause then Return to Base to manually go back to base. Once at base, you get to upgrade your ship parts to a variety of new weapons and upgrades as your money allows you to.

The process is rinse and repeat but on higher levels, you get to experience enemies that fire off of you as well as just elements out to simply annoy you like fog and a whole lot more fog.

Suggestions

I have only one and I’m not even sure if it’s warranted: make the ship bigger. Currently, the ship’s size threw me off since I’m used to un-scaled ship VS rock elements on other similar iPhone games. However, I think the size maybe due to the other purchasable ships later in the game.

Conclusion

Space Miner is one of the biggest surprises of this year so far. It’s a game that pretends to be silly and innocent looking until you let the game unknowingly suck you in. That’s how good this game is and no, you really don’t need me to explicitly say: BUY THIS GAME, but I just said it anyway.