Junktopia Review

Junktopia is a release from Mobot Studios that was created in one week while the team took a break from a bigger project. They challenged themselves to make a full game in less time than it takes for someone to catch up on all of the current seasons of How I Met Your Mother. Was the result something to be celebrated in the App Store? Or should we not bother following the game's advice on recycling, and just go ahead and trash it?

I have to congratulate Mobot Studios for doing what they set out to do and crafting a full mobile game in one week. Sadly, that's where my praise will end, since this game is devoid of any semblance of fun. Despite the very positive message the game delivers of keeping one's planet clean and recycling, Junktopia itself is a bad enough experience to be considered actual trash. But hey, at least they managed to pump it out in just a week.

The aim of the game is simple: use your hover vehicle to float around, collect junk, and make it to the end of the level without blowing up. The controls are also similarly simple, asking you only to press anywhere on the screen to activate your ship's boosters and keep the vehicle in the air.

Boosting will cause your meter to run out, so you'll have to be very judicious with your presses. Of course, it's not terribly difficult to gauge when you'll run out of fuel, so you'll be fine if you just use little "hops" to get across to the levels and safely onto the platform at the end. Unless you're holding your finger down on your device in order to see how high the vehicle goes, you're not going to just run out of fuel in the middle of a level.

You'll explore two worlds, the Junktopia home world and a Classic Jungle Theme, filled with levels that pretty much all look and play the same way. You'll start on a platform, fly around collecting trash, and then end up on a platform once again. Yippee. The only discernible differences in gameplay are the placement of floating pieces of junk and whatever movie or TV show you've queued up on Netflix while you play this coma-inducing game.

There's a City Survival mode that offers you a chance to endlessly collect trash through a futuristic city for as long as you can avoid debris. If you have some trouble sleeping, you could probably load up this mode and play it (I'm using the word "play" loosely here), in the hopes that it will lull you to sleep within ten minutes or so.

The last mode of play available in Junktopia is a special set of levels in which you can collect Legendary Junk. These levels are unlocked by finding special maps hidden through the game's first two worlds. Of course, this might seem like a worthy challenge for completists, but you don't really get anything out of it other than the satisfaction of knowing that you wasted your time for glowing pieces of floating space garbage.

Junktopia is quite possibly the most boring game I have ever played, which is saying something since I once challenged myself to see if I could build a sturdy house for my action figures using nothing but old Disney Adventures magazines. The graphics are on par for a high quality flash game, but certainly nothing I'd want to pay one whole dollar for, especially when the resources are wasted on bits of cartoon refuse.

The only thing I really liked about Junktopia was the fact that throughout the levels, a crashed ship would always appear on screen, completely identical to yours. And in this ship is a skeleton wearing shades and stupid purple hat, also completely identical to yours. This macabre image in an otherwise mind-numbingly lackluster game serves as a warning that you're wasting your time by playing it. So save yourself, and your dollar, and find a better game elsewhere.

Store Link: Junktopia for iPhone & iPad | By Mobot Studios | Price: $0.99 | Version: 1.0 | 52.4 MB | Rating 4+