Game Reviews

Asteroid 2012

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| Asteroid 2012
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Asteroid 2012
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| Asteroid 2012

The original Asteroids is one of the pivotal titles in video game history, one which kick started a pastime that’s kept people out of the sunshine for three decades.

Now, 32 years later, some bright spark thought the 2D space blaster par excellence would be infinitely improved if it was forced into three dimensions and given a weak techno soundtrack.

Asteroid 2012 (copyright fiends, note the lack of ‘s’ at the end) is almost everything the original game was not: it’s slow, unpolished, and somehow makes blasting space rocks as scintillating as hosing the garden.

Nearly dead space

For reasons left unexplained, your space fighter is stranded next to an abandoned station in the middle of the galaxy’s slowest asteroid shower. These drifting rocks are fatal to the touch, so you have to dispatch them, using what amounts to an interstellar pea shooter.

Tiny laser pulses dribble out of your guns and amble their way towards the asteroids, yet somehow manage to tear them apart on contact - and sometimes when flying past them, too, thanks to the seriously suspect collision detection.

Larger asteroids then split into smaller rocks that float about and need to be zapped again before they’re no longer a threat. Enemy fighters pop up from time to time, but the blue jet streams trailing behind them make them easy to spot and pick off with the minimum of fuss.

Bullet-soaking Mother Ships are a tad more of a challenge, although they politely crawl across the screen like giant metallic sitting ducks.

Unless you’re playing with oven mitts on, the first 20 levels are ridiculously easy and drag like a Deep Space Nine marathon. After that, things hot up a bit, with more enemies clamouring for screen space. But once your three lives are spent, the thought of replaying those snail-paced first stages is hardly appealing.

To 3D or not 3D

They’re not going to win any prizes for space-shooter originality, but Asteroid 2012’s graphics do sparkle at points - especially the detail on the rocks and the distant planets.

The experience feels unfinished, though, with missing explosion effects (where asteroids just vanish) being the main offender, while only online leaderboards and the promise of carrot/stick OpenFeint achievements keep you plugging away.

And the switch from 2D to Unity-powered 3D brings its own pitfalls, as the bizarre lack of a radar means you have to guess the location of rocks floating behind you - often with fatal results.

Fortunately, the tilt controls are responsive and easy to calibrate, while the tap icons for shooting and boosting out of harm’s way work adequately.

Space evaders

Asteroids purists who don’t get on with the 3D approach can switch to the 1979 Mode (added, apologist-style, in a post-launch patch), which looks and feels more like the original arcade game with a few 21st century graphical bells and whistles.

The tricky-to-master classic controls, with the ship only able to turn when you’re not using thrusters to move, return in this mode, too.

Unfortunately, pivoting left and right is left to accelerometer tilting - rather than a virtual joystick - which feels unnatural. This means you’re generally wrestling for control of your ship, rather than zipping between floating rocks.

It’s a symptom of the lack of care and attention Asteroid 2012 takes in updating a classic, ensuring it’ll never be more than a footnote in Asteroids's history.

Asteroid 2012

A mostly unwelcome space invader that’s further proof that adding a third dimension rarely triples a game's appeal
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Paul Devlin
Paul Devlin
A newspaper reporter turned games journo, Paul's first ever console was an original white Game Boy (still in working order, albeit with a yellowing tinge and 30 second battery life). Now he writes about Android with a style positively dripping in Honeycomb, stuffed with Gingerbread and coated with Froyo