PreCentral: Meteroids is Missile Defense on interplanetary steroids

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Back in the summer of 2011, Pixilabs Software released a fun, simple, and yet challenging game into the App Catalog called Tap-Tap Rockets. The concept was simple: take the classic missile defense game and wrap it around a rotating planet, and while Tap-Tap rockets was never a smash hit in the App Catalog, it did manage to garner overwhelmingly positive reviews from those who bought it. Fast-forward a year and a half to today, a time when many developers have abandoned webOS, and Pixilabs is back with a follow-up to Tap-Tap Rockets: Meteroids.

Operating on the same basic concept as Tap-Tap Rockets, Meteroids places you in command of a rotating planet armed with missiles that you must fire to shoot down approaching asteroids. It's much like the Missile Defense of yore, though more challenging in that you not only have to time your launches so they will intercept with the encroaching space rocks of doom, but you have to deal with the fact that your launch platform is spinning around as you do that. Your little planet is protected by shields, but they can only take so many hits before you die off.

For most games, if we told you that it only had nine levels, you'd laugh at the $3.99 asking price. Truth is, it's well worth the money. Meteroids requires some pretty serious coordination, timing, attention, and more than a bit of luck. It took us well over an hour to get a handle on things in order to survive long enough to rack up the one thousand points needed to advance to the second level, and honestly we're having trouble getting past there. We'll give it time. As you advance through the levels you're given more to work with and more to deal with - Meteroids will give you more planets to defend and more rockets to launch, but it'll also throw more at you by making the planets move or lobbing asteroids that take multiple hits to destroy.

There's an extra bonus to be considered in that $3.99 purchase if you're all-in on the webOS ecosystem. Unlike with Tap-Tap Rockets where Pixilabs created separate smartphone and tablet editions, the webOS edition of Meteroids plays with one purchase on all webOS tablets and smartphones, even the lowly original Pre and Pixi running webOS 1.4.5. There's also the bonus of gloating - Pixilabs Software's website states that Meteroids will be coming to both iOS and Android, but right now it's only available on webOS. Hours upon hours of gameplay and first launch bragging rights? Suddenly that $3.99 for Meteroids doesn't seem so bad.

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