Phil Reviews: Orbeats

Greetings friends! Phil has returned to bring you a tasty morsel from the Apple App Store: Orbeats!

If you own an iPhone or iPod Touch (to be honest, who doesn’t these days) then you’ll want to check this game out. Its fun, easy to play and suitable for all ages. So everyone can have a go!

Made by StirFire Studios, this Aussie indie developer put this awesome game together with many useful features. Orbeats fits quite comfortably in the music game genre. If you’ve played TapTap, you’ll have no problem adjusting to this one. Never played it? No problem! The controls are very straightforward and there’s an in-game tutorial ready to help you if you want. But here is where it gets interesting:

Note the pinwheel-style menu.

One of the features that truly separates this game from the rest is the unique menu selection screen. While holding your finger on the pinwheel gently slide it up or down to choose from the options on the menu. If you’re starting out, you only have one level to choose from. However, you get to choose if you want to play it on easy, normal, or hard.

You can also do a practice run to learn the patterns.

Once you pick a level and difficulty, this is where it starts to get fun. A predetermined track starts to play, with different obstacles moving towards certain spots in a circle. You have to time your taps perfectly for the highest score and of course, you have to follow the rhythm!

When you finish a level in a specific difficulty, you unlock the next in the same setting. So if you want to play the next level on hard, you gotta do all the ones before it on hard too.

You unlock trophies the better you play!

Much like other games out now, this one comes with its own set of trophies for you to unlock. The more and harder you play it, the more trophies you unlock. Just that little bit extra you need to keep you motivated!

This game also has a “kids” setting for children that find the game too challenging. You can turn it on in the options menu. Then when setting the difficulty of the level you want to play, just select kids. After you do the patterns and music will change for a more kids feel.

The Kids mode option.

If you get tired of the level tracks you can buy new ones as your score gets higher. It’ll keep you on your toes (or in this case, thumbs) with new patterns!

So there ya have it folks! A really cool indie game that’ll keep you entertained for hours on end. You can pick it up on Apple’s App Store for $2.99US.

Ta-ta for now!