xbox live indie game reviews

Despite the ridiculous title, Planet Crashmania 9,000,000 is actually a lot of fun. You play as the entire race of a doomed planet, locked in a slowly decaying orbit that will ultimately plunge you into either a sun or a black hole (depending on the level). Luckily, another suitable planet (or several) is within reach, if you can manage to make it through marauding aliens and orbiting asteroid debris. Gameplay boils down to two options--either build a missile to take out the asteroids/aliens or build a passenger ship (each ship holds 2,500 passengers) and fire it off towards the replacement home... then repeat.

Your engineers have mastered nuclear missiles, space shuttles, and extraterrestrial colonization, but unfortunately they're not big on guidance systems. Once fired, each projectile goes in a straight line until it either hits something or leaves the star system. The main challenge comes from the difference in orbital paths and speeds--you must constantly fire missiles at where you estimate an object will be in a moment or two. The home planet has a finite population and an onscreen time limit lets you know when your homeworld will cease to be. Alien attacks and missed passenger ships will thin your population, as will rogue missiles that hit your destination planet. A variety of powerups make things easier--from slowing or growing the destination planets, adding bonus time or population, or flat-out increasing the population of your colonies.

The game isn't perfect--especially the controls. You use left or right on the d-pad to create a shuttle or missile, aim using the left stick, and fire with the 'A' button. Constantly switching between the left stick and the d-pad is a bit of a pain, especially considering none of the other buttons do anything (triggers? hello?). The background music is a little too quiet and the sound effects are little too loud--not to mention the fact that the death screams get annoying pretty quickly.

The spinning planets and asteroids are hypnotic, though, and it's easy to sucked into the game and play for longer than you intended. There's a certain delicious quirkiness at play: in case you've ever wondered, shooting a busload of people into the sun does in fact kill them all. As you get really close in, the massively proportioned rocket actually sticks far enough out of the planet that you have to keep it rotated away from the sun to prevent it from getting "scraped" off. Planet Crashmania 9,000,000 is only 200 points, and it's definitely a game I'll come back to. Worth the points!