Amazon’s been bringing over several of their mobile games to iOS now, and Tales from Deep Space ($3.99) is their latest and their best. It took some time to make the leap from the Kindle Fire tablets, unlike Lost Within ($3.99) and Til Morning’s Light ($3.99) which launched simultaneously on both Fire OS and iOS. This is a puzzle-platformer where you control two characters, and it’s got clever puzzles to play with, though the combat portions tend and clumsy controls do drag the experience down a bit.
You control E and CASI, a human and robot respectively, unwitting partners who get tangled up in a big conspiracy involving an alien race, some shady characters, and a giant robot overlord AI. You’ll be using each character’s abilities to navigate the world, acquiring new abilities and trying to accomplish your current goal, which keeps changing depending on the story. There are plenty of weird, squishy aliens to encounter along the way, though.
What Tales from Deep Space does really well is to make its puzzles feel really good and satisfying to solve. Everything can feel kind of straightforward, but here, it feels like they’re just well-designed puzzles that take advantage of the fact that you have two characters you can control indpendently. Nothing feels too obtuse or out-of-the-way, success often feels like a natural solution, as it should. It’s enjoyable, because the game does require you to think and effectively swap between characters to solve the puzzles you’re presented with. But the game never feels like it’s trying to frustrate you, just to challenge you to use the two characters and their abilities properly.
There’s some fun stuff to do, as well. There are door-switch puzzles, but the anti-gravity balls that you get have some fun uses, like raising boxes, to get you up to bigger heights, and even to incapacitate enemies. The game even provides clever ways to trick and fool enemies beyond just blasting them to bits. Solving the puzzles feels like fun, and this was a game that I easily lost hours of time while playing in long sessions.
Tales from Deep Space‘s character-swapping is fun to use, because each character is well balanced. E has the guns and isn’t as mobile, but his ability to go through pipes comes in handy. CASI is the more mobile of the duo, but he’s no slouch in combat with his rapid-fire punches. Plus, key abilities like the anti-gravity balls can be used by both characters, so neither feels isolating or limiting to use. They make for a great duo. While character switching works well here as a solo affair, with simple virtual commands to swap between characters and to freeze one in place, you can team up with someone else on a separate device to get some co-op action in. Though, the game does work perfectly fine as a solo affair.
The controls are generally okay, using a touch-and-drag system to move. It works well enough to move around the world, but there are some issues when you have to drop down a gap instead of jumping across it, for example. You have to aim the drag line low enough to get your characters to go down that hole . It’s not the most intuitive, but in normal situations? The game is fine for navigating the world. I do wish there was controller support. Navigating the large map is similarly “flawed but okay" because the map doesn’t actually show where you are specifically, but the exit points are logically placed. Plus, the game does guide you along well enough. There are collectables to be had off the beaten path, but if you follow the game’s natural path, you won’t get too lost.
Unfortunately, like many puzzle-platformers, the combat in Tales from Deep Space hurts the game. What you have is a game that’s just not built for fast-reaction combat, and there are some circumstances where it becomes necessary. And all that stuff I talked about with the puzzles just feeling right? Too many combat situations don’t feel right. I’d rather that all the solutions to combat be like the puzzles, where you have to be smart, instead of fighting the game’s controls in order to shoot that mechanized bee nest thing, or trying to kill deadly robots before they kill you. These are the worst and clunkiest parts of the game, and should have been set entirely around moments like using an anti-gravity ball to raise them up to an electrified ceiling, instead of just blasting them to death. Plus, the tap-and-hold to use your secondary ability or item? It’s a pain if you need to trigger it quickly. It’s not perfect, for sure.
What Tales from Deep Space provides is a lot of puzzle-platforming fun, albeit not as a perfect package. You’ll get your money’s worth out of the $6.99 price tag here, as this is lengthy for a mobile game, for sure. And hey, if you have two devices, you can get some co-operative fun in with this one, too. I have a few grievances with it, but overall, this is a worthy purchase and a fun puzzle-platformer.
