Brave the Cave- Graviton Reviewed

Gravitron for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Developer: Virtway, Publisher: Chillingo

What’s
so fascinating about a post-apocalyptic setting? It’s a complete
destruction of the tedious factors in life. It’s a reversion to a life
similar to that of primitive man. It’s a great setting for one person
to become a savior to many, or to do the opposite. It’s a setting where
choices become more clear, much more black and white. Graviton is a game that gives you a simple but mysterious task in a post-apocalyptic setting.

Graviton is a cave-flyer action/puzzle game for the iPhone/Touch. Cave-flyer games follow in the footsteps of games like Gravitar and Thrust,
and often feature delicate ships trying to carefully navigate
low-gravity environments by utilizing thrust, gravity and momentum. The
upcoming PixelJunk Shooter is an interesting new take on the cave-flyer subgenre. Graviton is essentially a Thrust
clone. Your sole mission in each level is to find a small orb and
transport it through tight and hazardous caves, via tow-cable, to a
platform deep within the caves. There’s currently no noticeable
storyline implemented but that will change with the upcoming v1.1.

Graviton
utilizes the iPhone/Touch’s accelerometer but it just doesn’t work very
well. The calibration gives you no chance to decide when you’re ready
and the motion control’s dead zone is much to large. This means you
have move your device a lot just to start moving in a direction, but
once you reach that point, the ship accelerates much too quickly. It’s
not broken and you can get used to this but, even having beaten normal
mode, I never really felt like it “clicked”. Touching the edges of the
screen to boost works well, but tapping the ship to drop the orb is a
bit too finicky.

Graviton‘s main selling points seem to
be its large 3D rendered levels and its puzzles spread throughout.
Sometimes you’ll have to move quickly and accurately and sometimes
you’ll have to carefully plan out your actions, due to the various
hazards. While the game is fairly successful in these areas, the 3D
graphics are a bit primitive with odd design choices. (I’m inside some
huge beast’s bowls, but I can see the outside in the background?)
There’s some basic physics implemented but it’s not really used for
anything too interesting and feels scripted at times. The puzzles in
the game were rarely challenging. It was more a matter of jumping
through their hoops than solving them.