FingerGaming

Rating:

• Price: $1.99 (Get It)
• Version: 1.0
• Official Site: NinjaBee

I loved Outpost Kaloki X, and it’s still one of my favorite Xbox Live Arcade titles. Part tycoon game and part corny story, it’s something like running a lemonade stand in the middle of a Douglas Adams novel. The iPhone port — now titled Kaloki Adventure — stays true to the Xbox title and its PC predecessor, and it’s a fantastic way for newcomers to enter the action, despite some minor control issues.

There’s an odd narrative to Kaloki Adventure that builds around your role as the manager of a space port, but the basic gameplay is quite simple: Ships arrive, demanding any number of services — from pawn shops to chemical labs — and you’ll need to build them while dealing with a number of financial and electrical constraints.

Your space station is a sphere, and the touch screen provides an especially nice means of moving around the station. Each of your managed outposts has a variety of individual “ports” to which you attach some sort of commerce sites, and like similar tycoon games, these ports can then be upgraded or sold.

The buttons for managing these smaller tasks, however, are frustratingly small, and without tiny and/or nimble digits, you’ll likely find Kaloki Adventure to be a game filled with a lot of mis-pressed menus.

There’s also an odd sense of gravity to the game, and (made to replicate space itself, I assume) it’s sometimes hard to keep your station from spinning. While a flick of the finger easily rotates your space outpost, stopping that station — or finding the precise point for placing an expansion — is often a waiting game. Likewise, the game lacks pinch-to-zoom controls, so the level of detail seen in the screenshots is what you’ll see during most of the game.

And I mention these control issues because they’re the moments when this game seems most like a PC/360 port — and are thus the moments when the game is the most frustrating. Making buttons and touch-sensitive areas just a bit bigger would go a long way in terms of a complete game experience. I never once had a complaint about the controls for the 360 version of Kaloki, but the iPhone version provided some button-based moments of frustration.

There’s also a fair bit of content missing in the iPhone translation, but considering that Kaloki Adventure is only a fraction of the Xbox title’s price, you’re essentially picking up a rather nice game at a really attractive price point. And control issues aside, this looks exactly like the Kaloki game you’ll see on other platforms.

In short, if the Kaloki name doesn’t ring any bells — and especially if you’re a fan of tycoon-esque games — this is one to purchase. Ninja Bee has delivered a zany narrative and a successful gaming brand in a nicely portable form.

Tags: kaloki, kaloki adventure, ninjabee, reviews, tycoon