Saturday, October 8, 2011

FlyMe2TheMoon - 0.99 (miHoYo Studio)

FlyMe2TheMoon is a new action-adventure game with an anime theme developed and released by miHoYo Studio. In the game, you will guide your character, Kiana, with a “one button/slide to play” control scheme, through 60 different levels. There are 4 different styles, or modes, that each of the levels fall into; Adventure, Puzzle, Racing, and Survival. Each is as it sounds, in the Adventure levels, you’ll explore the levels looking for the 3 stars, and collecting all of the diamonds that you can before reaching the moon at the end of the level. Puzzle levels have different paths you’ll need to take to get through the levels, sometimes backtracking and going back through different paths in order to collect all of the 3 stars. Racing levels are set up so that you get more points the quicker you make it through the level, and Survival levels have quite a few hazards that you will need to out maneuver for a certain amount of time while waiting to move onto the next section in order to survive and make it to the end of the level.

To move Kiana through the levels, you’ll need to hold underneath her to start up her jetpack, and then keep your finger underneath her, and slide it to the right to move her left, and to the left to move her right. It might sound like it’s a weird control setup, but it’s not really, and feels very fluid and becomes comfortable fairly quickly. Throughout the game, you’ll come across lasers, spikes, wind tunnels, timed bricks that close behind you, as well as many more little obstacles and hazards that will effect how quickly, how carefully, and which paths you decide to take while going from level to level. At the beginning or end of some of the levels, you’ll get bits and pieces of Kiana’s story, learning why she’s in this place, and some background of her past. The story is well written, and does add quite a bit to the game, knowing why a character is stuck in a particular place always kind of makes these types of games feel more polished and thought out than others without any sort of story at all.
The graphics are done extremely well, and look beautiful on retina display. Each of the four different types of levels has a different environmental feel to it, and the music fits this beautiful graphical display to a t. The animations for all of the environmental hazards and obstacles are done extremely well, and give everything within the level a degree of personality. However, the animations for Kiana are kind of weird looking. Whenever she is moved left or right, or falling downward, she waves her arms around and has a facial expression that makes you think she is freaking out like a little school girl seeing a rat at her feet. It kind of takes away from the confidence that’s portrayed by Kiana throughout the story.
There are GameCenter leader boards for each of the 4 worlds, as well as a total score, and 17 achievements, all of which combined with the 3 stars you’ll have to collect, 180 in total, add quite a bit to the replay value. $0.99 is a great price for the amount of polish, content, and replay ability that’s all thrown into FlyMe2TheMoon, and if you’re a fan of anime themed games, $0.99 should be considered a great price. Aside from the character animations, I should also mention that FlyMe2TheMoon does not run on 2nd GEN devices or older at the moment, but the developers have said that they are working on a fix, so look for that in an update. But with 60 levels, all of which are very well thought out, with most of them taking more than one or two tries to collect the 3 stars within them, and how great the environments, hazards, and obstacles all look combined with how well they all interact with each other comes together to create an amazing action-adventure-puzzle gaming experience. MiHoYo has easily gotten on my list of developers to keep an eye on with this release, and I can not wait to see what they come up with next.

FlyMe2TheMoon gets a score of 9 out of 10.



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Version Reviewed; V 1.0
Reviewed On; 4th Generation iPod Touch - iOS 4.3.3

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