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Spheroid X Review: Not dying on the first round is almost impossible…

Spheroid X by Spheroid Games is a zero-gravity platformer game for Android. Set within a massive 3D maze, your mission in this game is to find all the “Sun Keys” scattered around each level in order to escape the labyrinth and move on to the next challenging level.

Played using 3 on-screen controls, Spheroid X is played by touching and dragging on an on-screen joystick in order to control the direction and power of your ship’s main thrusters. You are also given a boost button for getting out of tight situations and a brake that immediately stops your ship wherever it happens to be. Using this last button is vital to the game’s overall playability and will “literally” save you from dying within the first 3 seconds of starting each level.

Although most of the levels we have played through so far were by no means easy, they also weren’t all that hard either, requiring more patience than anything in order to make it to the end. Whenever anyone tried to rush through a level, they paid the price… 💀

https://youtu.be/BErd65UcIWM

Diving into the graphics, this is where Spheroid X could definitely use some future improvements. Although the graphics aren’t terrible (the level design is actually really nice) the graphics are fairly inconsistent mixing 3D elements with 2D ones in a way that makes the game look more “hacked together” and cheap than it actually is.

Simply replacing these 2D elements with matching 3D ones would improve the overall feel of the game tremendously. Also, the UI (User Interface) could use some improvements since arrows aren’t exactly the most descriptive things in the world…

The last change we would recommend is the way in which the game teaches new players how to play. It is an issue seen in almost all indie games where the tutorial is separate from the actual game itself.

Whereas studios like Ketchapp and Voodoo incorporate the tutorial into the first level which basically forces players to “read the manual” indie games often don’t do this which is terrible for player retention – especially in a game like Spheroid X that will literally launch you into a wall and kill you over and over until you finally figure out how to use the brakes.

We learned this the hard way… 😂

Although Spheroid X has its faults, overall the gameplay was fun and challenging which is exactly what you want in a platformer game set in space.

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Find it on Google Play