The Mooniacs
Score: 88% ESRB: 4+ Publisher: BANDAI NAMCO Games America, Inc. Developer: Bad Juju Games Media: Download/1 Players: 1 Genre: Puzzle
Graphics & Sound: The Mooniacs is a physics-based puzzle game that will have you launching your strange alien characters around the screen in the hopes of picking up yellow bugs called JujuBees so you can repair your ship. Simply put, the game looks good on the iPad's big screen. The sprites are clean and colorful and the wide variety of backgrounds that go with the game's three different themes just look good. While the JujuBees don't have a lot of variety to them, as they really only seem to differ in size, the few Mooniacs that appear in the game look both fun and outrageous. Sound is another delightful aspect to The Mooniacs. The background music fills the tablet's speakers with very light-hearted and cheerful music that has enough of a beat to it to keep things interesting. On top of that, the game's various sound effects add enough polish to make it feel complete all around.
Gameplay: The Mooniacs is based on a pretty basic concept. You will launch one of three characters around the level in an attempt to gather as many of the floating JujuBees as possible. At the end of each level, you are judged based on the number of JujuBees, and the time it took you to complete the level, as well as a score derived from any multipliers, the larger JujuBees, you might have picked up. It took a bit for me to get a handle on how the scoring system worked, but it's actually pretty simple. In general, if you collect only the bare minimum of JujuBees necessary to complete the level, you will end up with one star. If you collect a majority of them, but leave even one on the field, you will get two stars. You will only get three stars if you manage to collect all of the insects in the single fling you are allowed. If you complete the level fast enough, and you hit your multiplier JujuBees correctly, you will go past a target score that will then earn you a trophy instead of three stars. While collecting stars and JujuBees is necessary to progress in the game and see how the story plays out, this basic scoring system is one of the main driving forces behind the game's replay value. While it took me some time to get through the game's 90 levels, I didn't feel like I was quite done with The Mooniacs. I still had to go through and get at least three stars on every level. To make matters worse, once I did that, I felt compelled to earn trophies on everything. While I am still working on this particular goal, it was enough of an incentive to keep me up until 2:00 AM on at least one occasion. To add to the game's clever incentive system, JujuBees can be traded in for Ship Parts. These are the pieces that fell off of the Mooniacs' ship as they crash landed on the strange planet the game takes place on. While these parts aren't anything as specific as what you would see in Pikmin, they do allow you to eventually see the game's ending story. There are actually three different endings, and each one requires more parts than the previous. What's a shame is that it takes more than a single play-through to get enough JujuBees together to trade in for even the first ending sequence. At least replaying a level will add to your JujuBee stash and the developers at Bad Juju Games were kind enough to let users buy and download additional JujuBees, at a nominal fee, of course.
Difficulty: The Mooniacs has a wide range of levels that all appear simple at first glance. While most will let you get by quickly, there are a ton that had me playing the level over and over again, even for the basic one-star requirement to move onto the next level. The difficulty only increases when you actively try and earn trophies or all three stars. Since the multiplier JujuBees only increase the score of any JujuBees collected after them, I found myself doing a good bit of planning, and a lot of trial and error, when trying to maximize my score and earn trophies. As a result, by the time of this writing, I have quite a few trophies scattered across the game's 90 levels and I have meticulously gotten trophies in all the levels of the first two chapters. Of course, these earlier levels are the easier ones. I must admit the upcoming challenges in the later levels are going to be quite a bear.
Game Mechanics: For the most part, one level of The Mooniacs is like any other. The background changes, the layout of the JujuBees change and various things like trampoline mushrooms or moving platforms are thrown in to make things more interesting. What really makes The Mooniacs stands out are your characters themselves. There are three Mooniacs, a purple U-shaped one, a blue square and a black rectangle, and each one has a slightly different feel that, more or less, corresponds to weight. The black square is light and tends to fly rather fast, but it also has a tendency to get pulled around by the wind in some of the game's later levels. The blue square is heavier and definitely falls faster than the others. The U-shaped one, on the other hand, is in between the two and it is also your starter character. What makes these characters interesting though, is the fact that they will essentially help each other out in a lot of levels. Understanding how the Mooniacs behave is one of the key ways to getting through this game. For instance, according to the game's loose story, the U-shaped one and the black one fall in love at some point. As a result, when you launch the U-shaped one when the black one is also in the level, it will go flying in the same direction and velocity that you sent the U-shaped one. When you are controlling the blue Mooniac, and it hits the black one, it will go flying off and go bouncing around really fast. Also, when the blue Mooniac lands on the U-shaped one, the purple creature acts like a trampoline. This might sound a bit confusing at first, but the game does a pretty good job of slowly introducing these game mechanics and getting you used to them in order to solve the various problems it throws at you. If you even remotely like physics-based puzzle games, then this quirky title is something you should check out. Not only are there a ton of levels available, but there is a lot of replay value as well. It is well worth the $1.99 price tag.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
Related Links: The Mooniacs | iTunes The Mooniacs Official Home Page Namco Bandai’s iOS Home Page
Bastion Catherine