When you grasp your iPhone, iPad, or iPod, the last thing you expect to be controlling is gravity itself.
In this swipey-wipey IOS game, you find yourself following a growing planet, with a dream – yes, planets dream – to grow big enough to orbit the lonely Sun and begin a new solar system. There are five planets on their way to begin their new lives, and the only way for them to grow bigger is to collect all five planet cores, these are raw materials that will allow your planet to grow, they are scattered around the three stages in each world, but with each one you collect, your size stays the same. It’s like you collect and harvest them until the very end. And as a vulnerable, new planet you aren’t a fortified rock, you are in fact, also a planet core, but the animated, master one that begins the growing process, by travelling through the worlds, avoiding dangerous obstacles surrounding you. The road to growth is going to be difficult.
There are five worlds to venture through, Nuriona, Ametho, Neryssa, Isoley and Siroccee. Each one holds their own gravity characteristics. The first world, Ametho sits in the balance of low gravity and heavy. It’s a clear starter world, and as you go through these worlds, the gravity varies, with one world being heavy in gravity so your planet falls quickly, and another being very low, and underwater so your planet rises quicker than it falls and floats slightly. There are also elements that work against you on some worlds, such as compressed gas that leaks out with force, thrusting you forward in the direction of its choice, or underwater geysers that throw you upwards.
“The music is very dramatic and feels very futuristic and inspirational. It helps drive game rather than droning on and boring you eventually.”
The gravity affects only your planet within the worlds, and the way you control your planet? Swiping your finger in the direction you want it to go, which changes the direction of gravity for that swipe. It isn’t however a simple case of one swipe, you’ll be swiping a lot, counterbalancing overshot swipes, swiping faster to push yourself out of danger, doing mini swipes rapidly to make your planet hover. Your swiping is controlling your planets gravitational effect and fighting against the worlds current gravitational pull. Confused?
Planet at rest. Falls to the ground.
Swipe upwards, planet shoots upwards, then falls back to the ground.
It’s a system that’s rather difficult to master, but you find that going slow and steady will eventually win the stage. Along the way you’ll have to avoid what look like crystals that are designed with the colour scheme of that world. Sharp, jagged crystals that stick out from the ceiling, and the floors. These crystal stalactites hanging down, and crystal stalagmites pointing upwards can even move up and down to act as a moving obstacle. They’re very ethereal in looks, and kind of pretty.
Once you’ve collected all five planet cores, – and you have to collect them all, otherwise you’ll have to float back through the world backwards…or kill yourself and restart, that works – a portal will open up right at the end, and that is the end point for that stage, or if it’s the last stage, then that world. You then move onto the next world.
“Lonely Sun is a very intuitive game, with a celestial charm, and a cute, developing backstory to go with it.”
The graphics are rather polished, and everything looks like sleek vectors, with detailed poly art, and shading and highlights on the foreground objects. Lonely Sun also comes with some rather impressive lighting effects and particles flowing across the screen smoothly, and a background of galactic wonder. Basically, a lot of stars. The game doesn’t lag as such and mostly gives a smooth ride throughout each world, but there are moments where it does struggle to keep up, but only for a slight moment. I’m running it on an iPhone SE. The music is very dramatic and feels very futuristic and inspirational. It helps drive game rather than droning on and boring you eventually.
Now, the game suffers from a few issues. For example, for iPhones, notifications get in the way when you’re playing. I learnt this the hard way when I had just caught my fifth and final planet core, then a bloody notification for Snapchat arrived and made my swipe invalid, thus resulting in crashing and shattering. The games menu screens can sometimes overlay each other, resulting in the need to close and re-open, but it’s not that much of an issue for me but an issue that I noticed. The main thing that bothers me, is also the thing that the developers have acknowledged. In the game description on their App Store page, they have stated,
One thing we keep hearing from players: “No checkpoints?” Our response: “Does life have checkpoints?”
Well, no. Life doesn’t have checkpoints, but this is just a game, and the length of the levels compiled with the amount of times you can fail could be a bit of a turn off for most players. Maybe adding an option to turn checkpoints on and off so the player can choose their own difficulty? Not adding checkpoints and making that type of a response just comes across as making an excuse to not implement a requested feature.
Overall, Lonely Sun is a very intuitive game, with a celestial charm, and a cute, developing backstory to go with it. While the controls are simple, they are challenging thanks to the games gravity system. It is a game to grab your hands on if you want to focus your attention away from whatever is bothering you, but be warned, the lack of checkpoints kind of puts it on the edge of being a rage quit type of game.
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