Venan Entertainment has been teasing us with their free spinoff of Space Miner [$4.99 / Lite] for months now. We first caught wind of the game at E3, and since then have been patiently waiting for their upcoming arcade twist on Space Miner. The basic premise of the game was explained in our preview:
Space Miner Blast will be supported by unobtrusive in-game advertising, with optional DLC which will add features to the game and disable advertisements entirely. Most of the original Space Miner has been stripped out in favor of a quick survival game with a very basic upgrade system. All you do is see how big of a multiplier you can keep going by blasting as much ore as you possibly can (while defending against enemies of course).
Unfortunately, along the way Venan hit some roadblocks. Namely the release of the iPhone 4, iOS 4, and all the other fun things that Apple sprung on developers between E3 and now. The good news is, Space Miner Blast was submitted to Apple a few days ago, and is pending approval before its unleashed to the masses on the App Store. In celebration, Venan released the following gameplay trailer:
In addition, they’ve provided some more details of what the game will include. Basically, it will be completely free to download and play with a few unobtrusive advertisements in menus, but nowhere when you’re actually playing the game. Three different ships are available via a 99¢ in-app purchase that each have different bonuses to attack, defense, and mining. Buying one of these ships disables advertisements and unlocks Retina Display graphics which likely are part of their new content delivery system mentioned in the previous post to offer high-definition games while staying under the critical 20MB file size for over the air downloads.
Either way, we’ll find out how it all works soon. We’ll have a review of Space Miner Blast as soon as it docks with the App Store.
