HAL Laboratory, who most people probably know from the Kirby or Super Smash Bros. series, created an internal studio for smaller projects called HAL Egg whose first project was the smartphone game Hataraku UFO which released in Japan back in November of 2017. It was a painfully adorable game where you’d control a UFO with a retractable claw like those claw machine arcade games, and you’d zip around the world helping people out using said claw. It was totally charming, well-suited to the mobile platform, and unfortunately only available in Japan. I desperately hoped HAL would bring the game stateside, and just a few months later they made my dream come true with a localized version titled Part Time UFO ($3.99). It was everything I hoped it would be, and our own Shaun Musgrave loved it to pieces as well with a 5 star review. The only real knock I had against it was that it didn’t support the full screen of my iPhone X, but HAL even came through on that one when they updated it for the iPhone X only about a month later.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Part Time UFO is that it was a fully premium paid title, despite it being just absolutely ripe for the free to play model. I think I’m not alone in really appreciating that they went that route and didn’t spoil a game with this much heart by constantly jingling a change jar in your face, but those who were hesitant about dropping the four bucks on Part Time UFO have been pretty out of luck since the game’s release more than a year ago as it’s held its $3.99 price tag firm the entire time. That changes today however, as in celebration of HAL Laboratory breaking the 50k followers mark on their official Twitter account, they’ve cut the price of Part Time UFO in half to just $1.99 on both the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store for Android. They do warn however that “this sale ends without any notice" so if you’ve resisted picking up this gem of a game previously you’d better do it quick and save yourself a couple of bucks, and then you’ll probably kick yourself later for not picking it up sooner at its still-a-bargain regular price. I’m also really hoping that we see more releases from HAL Egg in the future if Part Time UFO is an example of what we can expect from them.
