A Quick Look at ‘Cloud Girls’, a Cute 2D Action Game

Cocoa Touch Games has released Cloud Girls [App Store], a cute color-matching action game for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Protect your world by gathering falling stars by rotating a spinning, finger-controlled, multi-colored shield. As the game progresses, the falling, tumbling stars start to increase in speed and frequency, making it increasingly hard to spin your shield around fast enough. Bonus stars that provide extra score or replenish your lives fall among the other stars–make sure to let them through the shield.

Not far from a 2D rendition of Newtonica, Cloud Girls starts off at a moderate pace, but the difficulty quickly mounts as progressive level-ups increase the rate of the incoming stars. The fact that the player must contend with both blocking colored stars with like-colored shield segments and letting bonus stars in through gaps in the shield makes it difficult to establish a rhythm–and once thrown off, it’s a challenge to recover.

The time-based scoring (and you won’t last long), rapidly increasing difficulty, and online public scoreboard make Cloud Girls feel somewhat akin to Papi Jump as a gaming experience (despite the dissimilarity between their actual play styles)–a “maybe I’ll make the top 10 in just 3-4 minutes!" kind of thing.

Cloud Girls is available through the App Store for $2.99 [link].