xbox live indie game reviews

There's a lot to like about Gum Drop Celestial Frontier. The game is gorgeous, the music is great, and it's hands down one of the most polished games on the Indie Game channel. It's also trying something new, which is great to see. With all my caveats out of the way, let's get straight to why I don't think GDCF is worth 200 points: my thumb hurts. Like, a lot. And I play a lot of video games. After playing the first six levels, my left thumb refused to play any more--it's just too tiring.

You play as a mining ship with tractor beams galore. Instead of lasers, you carry around these big spikey balls and use your tractor beams and centrifugal force to bash the hell out of enemy ships. To get the big spikey balls moving fast enough to deal some serious damage, you basically just spin the left thumbstick in a circle so that the things will start spinning around you. I think this would've worked fantastically as a single attack, but to make that your only attack is just exhausting.

When you've got a couple of high-mass objects spinning around you, it also throws your controls completely out of whack--the force of the spinning object drags you towards it in weird ways. I think I would've liked it more if the movement and spinning were decoupled (i.e. spin with the right stick and move with the left). Instead of controlling the spin, the right stick controls the orientation of your ship. To mine asteroids, you have to point it it in the direction of something and engage your tractor beam. Once asteroids are "grabbed" you can carry them back to your mothership to deposit or just bash them into something.

While mining, enemy ships will try to blast both you and your mothership. Should either explode, the mission is a failure. I love the idea of mining, but the wobbling of your ship caused by the things spinning around it make it almost impossible to wield your tractor beam with any precision (I pretty much just held it down and grabbed whatever I ran in to). There are a variety of powered up weapons you can grab on to (missiles, shotguns, gravity wells), but these are almost more confusing. If you can rig a floating orb to shoot missiles, why the hell can't you put missile launchers on your main ship?

There's not a ton of variety in the levels I played (granted, only 6 of them). The enemies are different, but the different enemies don't add a lot to the gameplay (it's still spin in circles and bash things). There's an outside chance that I'm just a weakling, but I feel that the thumb exhaustion factor ruins any real possibility of the game being worth the 200 points. If there are any pro thumb wrestlers out there training for a big match, this game is a must have. For the rest of us--give it a trial download and take in all the neat ideas on display. It's not worth a purchase, though.