Appidemic: Spaceteam for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

If you have ever wanted to be a crew member on a rapidly deteriorating starship, Sleeping Beast Games’ Spaceteam may be the game you’ve been waiting for.

More accurately, if you’ve ever wanted a legitimate reason to scream over your friends and call them horrible names for something that really turns out to be your fault, Spaceteam is definitely the game you’ve been waiting for.

What is it?

The premise of the game is simple; you and up to three of your friends on a shared Wi-Fi or Bluetooth network are the crew of a starship attempting to outrun an exploding star. To do this you need to carry out a series of complex actions such as “discharge Clip-jawed Fluxtrunions” and other similar technobabble.

How does it work?

Essentially your device becomes a dashboard with a selection of buttons, switches and toggles for which you will receive instructions such as “set Sigmaclapper to 3.” As you and your team progress through the game you will each have more mechanical components on your screen at one time, and as the ship gets bombarded by cosmic energies these components will begin to fall apart and/or ooze green goo which needs to be cleaned up. In addition to all this madness you will regularly encounter asteroid belts (everybody shake!) and wormholes (flip! flip!!). Still sounds pretty simple right? Wrong! The catch to the whole experience is this, the instructions you receive are not necessarily for you. So as you and your teammates shout gibberish instructions at one another in a rapidly intensifying manner, the game (and starship) can very quickly fall apart.

Spaceteam never ends in a traditional sense, it just continues to get harder until you die. But the sense of accomplishment you feel each time you make it to the next area is very, very real, usually punctuated with high fives all around.

Is it contagious?

Spaceteam is a perfect example of what social gaming could and should be. It harkens back to the days playing Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64 with your closest friends, yelling at one another for looking at any corner of the screen but your own. Games played over long distance using the Internet as a bridge are fantastic in their own right, but the question for me is always how social is it, really? And for Spaceteam, the answer is more social than any other iOS game I’ve ever come across.

With a price tag of $0 (with optional in app purchases for extra content like game centre achievements, higher difficulty challenges and outfits) there is no reason not to check out Spaceteam.

Category: Games
Seller: Henry Smith
Cost: Free
Download: Spacetime