xbox live indie game reviews

In the aptly named Solar, you play as a wandering star. The universe is filled with debris such as asteroids, planets, and other stars. Passing by a planet at the proper angle causes it to be sucked into orbit. Running into things (asteroids, planets, other stars) causes you to lose mass while absorbing items from your own system causes your star to gain mass--eventually turning into a black hole. Just as you can suck planets into orbit, your planets can suck asteroids into orbit. Just as you can absorb planets, your planets can absorb these asteroids and grow in mass. Planets can grow from just-barely-above asteroids (looking at you, Pluto) all the way up to a star. At a certain happy medium (between barren rock and molten star), your planets can actually sustain life. Your inhabited planets will launch little green ships which blast asteroids and generally make it easier to fly around. You aren't the only star in the galaxy, and "enemy" stars will do their best to collect mass and sustain life (which will chase after you and try to destroy your planets).

Solar features both a sandbox mode and a challenge mode with 18 tasks. The challenges are fun for the most part, and they do a good job of exposing all of the game's features. Some of them seem a little wonky, though--no matter how many times I've collected blue, green, and red planets, I haven't been able to complete the "get one of each" mission. One of the missions requires you to "steal" five planets from other stars, but the mission "completed" after simply collecting five planets from the vacuum. After completing a challenge, you have to go all the way back to the main menu and cycle through to the next one, which is a bit of a pain. It's worth it, though, as your reward for finishing the challenges are some tweakable parameters for the sandbox mode.

Though I'd hardly expect it for a 200 point game, I think an online "versus" component would be a hell of a lot of fun.  As a single player experience, I typically hate sandbox games. Solar is a pleasant exception. Even without the sandbox mode, the challenges are enough to keep you entertained for a couple of hours. The music is great, and it's easy to get "sucked in" to playing the game for longer than you really wanted to. Solar is definitely worth the points.