Your spacecraft has crashed on the peak of an intergalactic mountain made of cubes, and you must hop all the way down while avoiding obstacles in Mars Mountain. It’s a downloadable game for iOS and Google Play (reviewed on iPad here) that resembles arcade classics like Q*bert.

To play, all you have to do is tap the left or right side of the bottom part of the touch screen to hop down to the left or right cube below you. You can’t hop up.  But be quick and make sure to avoid fireballs, asteroids, aliens in UFOs, spikes, exploding cubes, and other obstacles.  If you get hit, it’s Game Over.  You get a point for each cube you hop down, and you can also boost your score by collecting these little canisters.  The game will save your highest score.  You can also collect stars, and when you get 100, you can unlock a new character to play as, like an astronaut head, alien head, gorilla head, etc.  Although I don’t think any of them change how you play, they’re just cosmetic.

Every time you start the game, you have to begin with the tutorial, but at least you can skip it. The mountain is randomly generated each time you play, but it’s not designed very well as most of the time you’ll get a sequence of obstacles that are near impossible to bypass.  Plus the game has a bug where if you try to hop off a conveyor cube, you’ll get stuck.  Overall it’s an all right little time-waster of a game, but honestly I’d rather just play Q*bert instead.

Kid Factor:

If you get hit, you quickly explode, so violence is pretty minimal. Reading skill is helpful for the tutorial text, but not necessary as the game is pretty easy to figure out just by playing.  Younger gamers may get bored at the simplicity of the game and/or frustrated at the high difficulty.  Parental supervision is recommended for the in-game ads.

Tags: Game Reviews