Occasionally I’ll watch an app video to see what the game play looks like. Sometimes it’s enough for me to make the decision to try the game. More often than not I’m left underwhelmed. So before agreeing to try TouchStars from Touch Action, I clicked on the youtube link to see their promo. I liked the video so much, I agreed to look at the app. Take a look for yourself before I continue.

I hope that gave you as big a giggle as it did me.

 

TouchStars starts is not one of those games that will blow you away with eye popping graphics or a brilliant soundtrack. It’s old school simple, and the opening screen gives you a taste of what you’re going to get.

I will say that if you are one of those people, unfortunate enough to have to share your iPhone or iPod Touch with friends or relatives of all ages, that TouchStars is not going to make your life easier. Its dead on simplicity makes it the perfect game for both the very young (and young at heart), and those gamers looking for a bit of a challenge (that’s not me).

 

 

 

 

The first thing you get to do after beginning, is choose your difficulty level. Smiley faces hung like a traffic light offer you your levels. It’s simple to tell from their expressions which one is which. Again, this app is not designed to distract you with mind-numbing retina screen enhanced graphics. Sometimes these things are just not necessary. After all, how long are you going to spend on the screen choosing your difficulty level? Your mind was probably made up before you got to it.

 

 

 

 

 

Next, we move  to the levels. As you can see, I haven’t moved through that many, and I have played them all at the green smiley face level. But I need to replay some of them because despite playing at the lowest possible level…I’m not getting all the points the first time through.

TouchStars is not that easy – it does offer enough challenge to keep your interest. You can always go back and replay any level at any time. On the right, next to the level number, you can see the number of stars you collected on that level. As you saw from the video, the idea is all about collecting stars.

There are 20 levels in all, and they play a bit differently depending on the corresponding difficulty level.

 

On to the actual game play.

You are looking at a maze that begins to scroll upward when you touch the big black START at the bottom of the screen. Once you touch that START, just keep your finger on the glass and move around the maze as it slowly (or not so slowly) scrolls upwards revealing that  you’ve hit a dead end and need to go back down and around before the bottom scrolls away. The walls are, well, maze-like. Some are horizontal, some vertical, some rounded. There are stars stored throughout the maze, and the whole idea is to touch them as you work your way through. It sounds a whole lot easier than it actually is. As you move through the maze, you leave a white streak, like a trail of breadcrumbs, showing you where you’ve already been – in case you need to get back to take a different path.

There are other things that appear in the mazes that will help or hinder you on your star quest. In this screenshot to the left, you can see something at the bottom right of the maze that looks like a black and white snowflake. This is a “transport, and touching this lets you pass through the maze walls (for a short period of time), allowing you to escape from a dead end, or snag blocked stars. And because no maze is complete without PacMan style ghosts, TouchStars gives you ghosts, as well. The white ghosts hide the walls for a few seconds, and the grey ghost hides them forever.

The more stars you collect, the higher your score. The better you play the maze and manipulate the transports, the more stars you can collect. Thus far, I have consistently ended up on the opposite side of the walls from the last remaining stars when using a transport – but it hasn’t stopped me from trying.

 

At the end of each maze is a checkered flag. (An homage to NASCAR, perhaps?) After collecting all your stars, you need to touch the flag to end the round. From there, you can see your score, and choose to repeat the level, move on, or go back and retry a previous level where you didn’t get all the stars.

I honestly had great fun playing TouchStars, and will continue trying to get through the easy levels with all the stars…and then I might just go back and try medium difficulty.

A great time-waster for only $.99, it can be yours in iTunes. You can also visit the developer website for more screenshots.

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