Game Reviews

Kosmo Spin

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Kosmo Spin
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| Kosmo Spin

What do you seek in a partner: looks or personality?

It’s a silly question, because the vast majority of people would say both. The two are not mutually exclusive.

When it comes to games, we’ve reached a point where it’s perfectly reasonable to expect good looks and gameplay to match. Unfortunately, Kosmo Spin isn't quite the dream date it first appears to be.

Land of Nod

Kosmo Spin looks lovely, its patchwork DIY style a bit like LittleBigPlanet on PSP. These killer looks extend the game’s appeal considerably as Nod (that’s you) sets about defending his clockwork world from a breakfast-pinching UFO.

As this space invader hovers around your tiny planet, he bombards you with balls from various earthly sports and attempts to hoover up your delicious food items. You must drag Nod around to fend off these attacks and pick up breakfast.

The controls work reasonably well and there’s considerable appeal in dragging the whole universe around for the benefit of little old Nod.

Turn for the worse

Regardless of the appeal of Kosmo Spin’s universe and its world-spinning antics, it’s simply not as fun as it needs to be. Dashing around to header away footballs isn’t the tactile joy you'd expect it to be, and missing one has an irritating knock-on effect.

When one of these balls hits the ground, it stuns you for a couple of seconds, during which time another ball will probably be on its way. The number of times I found myself recovering from a hit only to be stunned again straight away was annoyingly frequent and frequently annoying.

This isn’t helped by a main Quest mode that contains tasks that veer between the ridiculously easy and the frustratingly difficult. Success in some tasks appears to be dependent on the UFO randomly deciding to grant you sufficient time to act.

Kosmo Spin is an attractive proposition, but it has a few too many annoying personality quirks to make a long-term relationship likely.

Kosmo Spin

Kosmo Spin looks a treat and features a neat universe-spinning concept, unfortunately it can’t back these up with sufficiently compelling gameplay
Score
Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.