eBoo - Space Adventures

It’s difficult to have expressive controls on the touchscreen: A design that would be challenging on a joystick can be downright impossible on the iPhone.

The space jam eBoo - Space Adventures walks the line carefully between tough puzzler and frustrating experience. It ends up being a simple, fulfilling experience.

The hero here is eBoo, a square green alien that even sticks out on his home planet. He accidently joins the planet’s army and now must help protect it using his undersized spaceship.

What follows is fifty levels of old skool puzzle solving. Your ship is capable of collecting stuff, hitting switches, and, using its big ol’ magnet, pulling up and dropping weaponry. Each level is a brief but intense experience, usually lasting no more than a minute.

The aforementioned control scheme actually works pretty well. You have two icons for left to right movement and an additional icon for upward thrust. Your main enemy is gravity, which is constantly pulling your ship down. Hit the ground or a wall too hard and you’ll crack your spaceship. Do it too many times and the game is over.

You're ranked on each level with the now traditional Angry Birds-style star system. However, completing the level alone isn’t enough for you to ace it – the only thing that does is open up the next zone.

Instead, you literally have to collect the stars in that level, which forces you to use valuable time and resources outside of the main objective. It becomes more touchy when you have limited gas.

eBoo has bright cartoon graphics, almost as big as the pungent sounds. In other words, it’s good for both puzzle aficionados and kids, though even adults may take a while to get used to the Lunar Lander-like control scheme.

The smooth learning curve helps the inspired controls and makes eBoo worth a look.