I had an opportunity to take Astraware's latest offering for BlackBerry, Platypus for a test drive, and it turned out to be a great voyage indeed.For Palm enthusiasts, Astraware is a well-known commodity. They produce and/or distribute some of the most popular games titles on the Palm and WinMo platforms (their parent company, Handmark, should give you an idea of their pedigree). So, when presented with an opportunity to survey their first BlackBerry offering, I jumped at it.
Platypus is an aerial shoot-em-upper that pits continual offense against strategic defense, and is based on the PC and Macintosh favorite of the same name.
Like Right Said Fred and his hopelessly inadequate shirt, Platypus is too sexy for earth. Instead,
it takes place on peaceful Mungola, where your mission is to defend your planet against marauding Collosotropolans that appear in many incarnations. You move around -- guns blazing -- dodging both swerving and bouncing alien aircraft, rumbling ground vehicles and dangerous terrain.Of course, no arcade-style shooter is complete without point bonuses that drop from exploding enemies, or weapon upgrades and power-ups that emanate from stars that the player has to collide with to redeem. Platypus brings all elements of arcade play to your BlackBerry device, and the four different worlds provide hours of game play.
The developers did an excellent job of using color to bring this adventure to life. The vivid representation almost literally allows one to lose themselves in the environment. The color differentiation between sky-to-sky and sky-to-ground were very, very well done. Hardware-wise, I found the game responsive to the Blackberry controls.
As far as ports go, this was pretty faithful to the original. Fans of the PC/Mac versions will be pleasantly surprised by graphics. Even the claymation is reproduced with an eye for detail.
My biggest complaint at this point is general in nature: why isn't Astraware spitting out more
games? Why? I still have a Palm device chock-full of their stuff. More, please!!!Pick up Platypus from the Astraware site, or check it out at the Handmark location. It is rated to play on all 81xx, 83xx, 88xx devices as well as the Bold. The game is available at a special price to all Club Astraware Members through December!
This game was tested (and review written) on a BlackBerry 8320 running OS 4.5 on T-Mobile.
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