Laughing Jackal has made some of the best Minis title to date. Orbit is one of them. Orbit is an action arcade game where you launch a dude to collect gold into the space. I ask myself "How can you come up with an idea like this ?"
The game features a simple story, two scientist have found gold floating around the planets of the solar system and one of them must be launched to collect it. You get to launch your character using different launching mechanisms, but they all have the same effect. Once you are into the air you can control, for a specific time,the vertical flight of your character so that he can collect more gold and avoid obstacles such as asteroids, space junk or different types of aliens with different effects on your character if you touch them. One covers a part of the screen with green slime making difficult to see what's going on behind or one that cause lost of gold. The obstacles grow as you progress through all the planets.
After collecting the gold, you spend it on upgrades. And the game has a lot of them. You can upgrade you launching mechanism or you can upgrade your character or you can buy a giant windshield wiper to wipe the slime of the screen. Every upgrade you buy changes not only the stats or let's call the "physics" of the game, but it also changes the way the thing you upgraded looks like. So you can upgrade your character with wings, aerodynamic hat or rocketboots and all of these change the way your character looks. I love when the games let's you do that.
Except the upgrades that adds to the replay value, there are blueprints and relics you can find.
Orbit succeeds where other games like this one fail, it keeps itself fresh with all of the upgrades you can buy, blueprints and relics you can find throughout the game even it's the same thing you do over and over again.
7/10 .
