Mooniacs Review

Physics games that involve slinging objects through the environment are becoming more and more prevalent for iOS. The latest of these is from Namco Bandai, and tasks you with slinging cute characters called Mooniacs through the world in an effort to collect shiny bits of gold. It's clearly aiming to capture the attention of the Angry Birds audience, and it does a good job at being just different enough to make it worth playing.

The Mooniacs are trying to collect parts to repair their broken ship. It's up to the player to sling them through the environment, aiming them in such a way that they bounce around and collect as many golden parts as possible. Just like Rovio's popular Angry Birds, the amount of tension you put affects how fast they fly, and determines how much they bounce around.

Outside of the slinging, Mooniacs doesn't have all that much in common with Angry Birds. Instead of destroying the environment, Mooniacs challenges you to think about how you can use the world to bounce your little character around. If you're a geometry master and have a decent understanding of rudimentary physics you'll quickly be pulling off trick shots. It's satisfying when, after several failures, you manage to position your Mooniac just right, bouncing them around in a way that collects all the tokens. Each map only gives you one shot, so it's definitely a trial and error affair. It avoids becoming frustrating, though, thanks to a line always shows you your last shot.

Collecting enough parts in each set of ten maps unlocks another ten, with a total of 90 altogether. It's a decent deal for the current $1.99 price, and each set of ten levels varies from one to the next. One stage might give you a Mooniac that's round and bounces like a ball, the next might challenge you to use a square one that bounces in an unpredictable manner. The basic slinging gameplay never changes, but the premise for each set of ten levels keeps it from feeling like too much of a grind.

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