This week hasn’t heralded any major App Store gaming releases, so this weekend, in the wake of the inamorata’s shamelessly bragged-about decimation of my all-time high score, I’ll be revisiting an old iPhone favorite: GeoSpark ($1.99) by Critical Thought Games.
GeoSpark is one of those deceptively simple little five-minute time wasters that can easily turn into multi-hour gaming vortexes. Although the game’s tutorial attempts to explain the game with a wordless graphical distillation, my experience has been that you need to be some sort of Cylon to figure out what it’s trying to say, so here’s how it’s played.
In GeoSpark, the goal is to destroy colorful geometrical shapes that nebularly drift onto the playing field, without ever allowing them to touch a different shape, which ends the game immediately. The player can do this in one of two ways: you can either tap the shape with your finger, or you can drag one shape into an identical shape to destroy both. The most points are allotted for stringing together long chains of identical shapes, but you have to be careful: the longer the chain, the stronger the force of gravity becomes around your finger. What this means is that the more shapes your chain together, the faster other shapes get sucked towards your finger: if any of those shapes collide with one another, it’s game over.
It’s a simple gameplay mechanic, but GeoSpark is deceptively difficult: my longest game lasted less than five minutes, and my high score is only 14,960. I’m sure you can do better. The trick to remember in getting high scores is not to get greedy: things get dangerous very quickly the longer you try to extend a chain.
What about you? What are you playing on your iPhone this weekend? Let us know in the comments.
