 
#27 (-5)
in Games |
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A Game That Will Absorb You: OsmosPosted in Simulation on 04 Aug 2010 |
 Written by Kevin Diep |
  (6 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)  Loading ... |
Eat it, grow bigger, avoid the bigger fish. These kinds of games have been around awhile already. But Osmos is a refreshing and challenging adaptation to the genre. If you have a lot of free time (or if you have plenty of things you’re trying to avoid) this app for the iPhone and iPad will eat it all up.
The rules of the game seem simple enough. It’s like those “biggest fish in the pond” games where a small fish (or bubble in this case) eats smaller fish and grows larger and the point of the game is to become the largest. Osmos is pretty similar, except you must eject bubbles (making yourself smaller again) to produce enough force to move in the direction you want to go. But this game also throws in a few new twists. There are the repulsors, which push away your bubble and cause you to spend a lot of bubbles trying to catch up to it. There are also the biophages who move like your bubble, the blackhole-like absorbers, and a host of other kinds of bubbles for your “lifeform” to avoid or absorb. As you play through the “Odyssey” mode and defeat these challenges, you unlock these challenges and more difficult ones in the “Arcade” mode.
The first thing that struck me about Osmos was the look. The game makes good use of the graphic capabilities of the iPhone and iPad. Even though the game itself is simple, the mechanics are complex and the objects are rendered beautifully. It’s a challenging game; I had to play several levels over and over again and some of them I beat purely by luck. But it’s really fun and I believe $2.99 I paid for it was worth it.
