Abductor Pro: Boxy, But Good [Review]

The universe has a problem: It has all these planets lying around with no life on them. So obviously, the solution is some kind of forced cosmic osmosis to spread vitality throughout the void.

That’s the premise of Abductor Pro, anyway. It’s a new iOS title that puts players in the space boots of Antaris, a green alien tasked with grabbing humans from Earth for transplantation to other, less human-y planets. But the planets are picky, and possibly racist*, and they’re very particular about who gets to live on them.

Your job as Antaris is to make sure the right people get to the right place.

The game’s viewpoint is from inside your UFO as you play your abduction beam across a variety of Terran landscapes. You tilt to move the green crosshair around and tap the right side of the screen to zap people into your ship. In later levels, the humans don’t take kindly to your swiping, so they send their own vehicles to stop you. Tapping on the left side of the screen fires your guns, so obviously success depends pretty heavily on accuracy and keeping your buttons straight.

The controls work pretty well, provided you’re sitting upright and looking at the screen from above; it has no “lying down” mode. Occasionally, I’d beam up a person in the far background instead of the closer one I was aiming at, but it’s hard to say if that was a fault in the controls or my own failings as an intragalactic kidnapper.

Success depends pretty heavily on accuracy and keeping your buttons straight.

The game has 14 planets to populate, and each stage begins by telling you which humans to grab and which to avoid (grabbing three “wrong” people ends the game). You can also look out for the King, who you can abduct to gain cherries to unlock more character models.

I have no idea what’s up with this game and cherries, but I’m just gonna roll with it.

Game Name: : Abductor Pro The Good: Simple concept, functional controls, and a surprising amount of tension from near misses. The Bad: You will either love or hate the blocky art style. The Verdict Abductor Pro gets a lot of value out of its core concept, and people wanting to see if they possess the rock-steady hands of a surgeon will want to give it a try. Buy from:App Store

[rating=game4]

*planets, being made of rocks and water, are actually incapable of racism.