Gravity Badgers is a physics-based arcade game that has you guiding a team of space badgers across 140 challenging levels of game play.
The story line has Captain T. Bayback traveling to the deadly depths of space to save his friends and family from the threat of the deadly Evil Honey Badgers. You duck and dodge asteroids and planet to eventually face pesky game bosses.
Available for low-memory devices, Gravity Badgers menus take a little getting used to but the game comes across as fun Windows Phone title to pass the time with.
Blasting into outer space
Gravity Badger's main menu has options to access the game's settings, access the game's social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), access an in-app purchase to remove the ads ($.99) and jump into game play. Settings include turning off the trajectory history, viewing the About Screen, deleting your game history and muting the sound.
Each gaming menu pulls up a space ball of sorts with blue neon buttons for each of the menu items. The buttons are a little difficult to read and do not have labels. Some of the icons on the buttons are no brainers but you may you will need to be a little patient in sorting out what other buttons represent.
Game play includes 140 levels of play spread across seven chapters. The first chapter, "A Badger's Guide to the Universe" is a series of tutorials where Captain Bayback teaches his young badger son the mechanics of the game.
The goal of each level is to deliver your badger to the wormhole and collect the stars that are scattered about the screen. To launch you badger, you just tap and hold the screen on the badger and slide your finger back. You can slide your finger around the screen to aim your badger and the further you slide your finger, the more power behind the launch.
Between your badger and the worm hole is an assortment of obstacles that include planets that will push or pull your badger, warp fields that will transport your badger from one spot to another, tubes the will re-direct your badger and more. Boss battles adds a challenging element to the game that is actively trying to destroy your badger. The boss battles call on you to keep your badger moving, avoiding the laser fire from the boss. Eventually enough ricochets will hit the boss and spell doom for the bad guy.
Each level affords you three attempts to safely deliver your badger to the wormhole. After each failed attempt, a dotted line will appear reflecting your previous attempt's trajectory. You can use this line to adjust accordingly.
Overall Impression
Gravity Badgers is a physics-based game full of challenging levels that will test your patience as well as your abilities for accurate aim. Graphics are nice but awfully tiny (and a little on the dark side) but I don't think you can avoid this and have the full gaming field on the screen.
There will be times where you don't have a lot of room behind your badger to set the power or aim of your launch. There will also be times where it's best to rotate your Windows Phone around to get a better sight picture. Neither are deal breakers but may cause a bit of frustration.
The only major downside that I could find with Gravity Badgers was that every so often a full-page ad would pop-up. The ad-banners that run across the bottom of the screen aren't too distracting but the full-page ad seems to knock you over the head.
Gravity Badgers is a fun game to pass the time with and not a bad addition to the Windows Phone gaming library. The game knocks down 3.5 Stars in the Windows Phone Store but most of the criticism was that you had to pay to play past the first level. With all the game free and ad-supported, we'd knock the 3.5 Stars up to at least 4 Stars.
- Gravity Badgers - Windows Phone 8.x - 45MB - Free - Store Link
