Galaxy Life goes pocket-sized

Galaxy Life Pocket Adventures from Digital Chocolate is a new iOS release based on the company's popular Facebook title Galaxy Life. The game is free to play and available now as a Universal download from the App Store. Galaxy Life's story revolves around Starlings, small orange creatures whose peaceful society was shaken when a purple, evil Starling was born and promptly started causing chaos. The player joins the game as the orange Starlings are locked in a bitter war with seemingly everyone else in the galaxy, and must build up their planet's defenses while ensuring they have a good income of resources with which to train new units and upgrade their buildings. Galaxy Life's gameplay is strongly reminiscent of Kixeye's popular Backyard Monsters title, itself set to arrive on iOS soon. Players split their time between building up their own base and attacking rivals, some of which are computer-controlled and others of which are managed by real players. During the base-building phase, players use soft currency and collectible mineral resources to construct buildings, train troops and create defensive structures such as turrets. In the early stages of the game, the player will be attacked at predefined intervals by computer-controlled invading forces, allowing them to see how the various defensive structures work. They are, however, initially protected from human-led invasion by a "Colony Shield" that lasts for either six hours or until they attack another player. This shield may be extended by the expenditure of hard currency if the player simply wishes to focus on construction without the threat of attack. To attack a rival, be they AI- or player-controlled, the player moves to a map screen and selects a planet to either spy on (which reveals the occupant's base) or attack. When attacking, players are presented with all of their available troops and must then simply tap on the screen to deploy them as they please. Once deployed, troops will attack structures around them until they either destroy everything or are destroyed themselves. The player has no means of directly controlling deployed troops, so must simply hope that the game's AI doesn't make any silly decisions -- a hope which is not always fulfilled, sadly. Galaxy Life describes itself as a "strategy" game but the actual "strategy" component is very lightweight. This has two opposing effects: on the one hand, it means the game is highly accessible to casual players; on the other, however, the lack of control and relative dearth of consequences for poor planning decisions may frustrate the "hardcore" players the game is trying to court. If the player plans their base layout badly, for example, they can just pick up and move their buildings without penalty. This feature is standard for most social games but undermines some key elements of more traditional strategy games for the core gamer: the need to consider potential consequences of actions; the need to adapt to new situations if a potential consequence wasn't considered; and the ability to fail. Like many other games of its type, there is no real means of "failing" in Galaxy Life -- if the player's base is attacked and destroyed, it is simply a mild inconvenience that can be rectified with either time or hard currency rather than something that the player must actually recover from. This, in turn, means that there is no real feeling of "tension" to the supposedly galaxy-spanning conflict in the game, it's simply "something to do" -- a feeling further exacerbated by the fact that the game's story peters out somewhat quickly leaving the player with little narrative justification for attacking their rivals other than "because they're there." Victory becomes a simple matter of oneupmanship through investment of time, money or both rather than actual strategy. Ultimately Galaxy Life Pocket Adventures does what it sets out to do: provide a good-quality mobile version of the original Facebook game, albeit one that does not allow players to share progress between the two platforms. The Facebook version has nearly 2 million monthly active users and 370,000 daily active users, so there is certainly a large existing market for this mobile edition. What it won't do in all likelihood, however, is make converts of those who are looking for a deeper, more interactive and challenging strategy experience. This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- the traditional strategy genre is notoriously inaccessible for newcomers -- but it certainly won't do much to attract the elusive "core gamer" market that so many social developers seem very keen to court. Galaxy Life Pocket Adventures appears to have dropped out of the top 400 in both the Top Free Apps and Top Free Games charts for both iPad and iPhone. It is currently ranked at No. 254 in Top Grossing iPad Apps, No. 315 in Top Grossing Games and No. 153 in Top Grossing iPad Games. Follow its progress with AppData, our tracking service for social games and developers.

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Galaxy Life goes pocket-sized

Pete Davison

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Pete Davison