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Halfbrick Studios’ second offering in the Mini category is Blast Off, a game with a simple premise. You are a small cartoon 1950s style rocket jetting around a 2d environment Asteroids-style to pick up stranded astronauts and then pop through a warp gate to safety.

The playing field is attractively drawn. Space sparkles with distant stars behind your spaceship, the astronauts, and the gravity-exerting celestial bodies that complicate your rescue efforts. One wrinkle is that gravity only affects your ship – the astronauts and celestial bodies are placed in the level as a puzzle to be solved and don’t affect each other.

The controls are responsive and straightforward, and they are well thought out. The Easy levels introduce the simple controls well, with later levels adding new concepts mostly through the level’s catchy, short name. I found myself stifling a giggle fairly often at the level names and at my own failed attempts to jet past a planet – the pop-like thump your crashing rocket makes still makes me smile.

Load times are basically nonexistent – starting and restarting a scenario is instantaneous. This makes hitting L1 to restart largely unnecessary – if you mess up you typically find out by smacking into a planet, asteroid, or center of a black hole rather quickly. Watch out for those event horizons!

The game’s really a score chase powered by a fun gravity simulator, and your level score is determined by how many astronauts you pick up along with the amount of unused air and unused fuel. Air is the level timer and fuel is, well, what you use to get around. Each level has a built-in Halfbrick Score to try and beat. I managed to beat that score just once on one level on my first run through the Easy, Medium, and Hard levels of the game.

You don’t need to nab all of your astronaut buddies to finish a level – it seems that just a majority of them is needed to activate the gate – but you do need them all in order to earn at least a Gold medal. Silver medals aren’t hard to earn, at least on the first few difficulty levels.

Like all Minis, Blast Off downloads and plays just fine on the PlayStation 3 at no extra cost above the USD$2.99 asking price. I prefer it on the PSP, though, because it runs just fine on the handheld and looks good to boot. I don’t really feel a need to play it on a bigger screen, and since Minis aren’t allowed network access the high scores are kept separately on the PSP and PS3 versions of the game.

As someone who isn’t a puzzle gamer, I was a bit leery of Blast Off. To its credit, however, the sessions with the game are so quick and the gravity works so intuitively that you know pretty quickly if you’ve done things wrong. Restarts are fast, and the game points your ship in the exact direction you last launched from notes on a thrust-meter exactly how much power you’d built up before blasting off towards your first target in your previous try. This encourages experimentation, and if you can hack it, you can always burn more fuel to try and correct a mistake and salvage a botched try.

Blast Off is great for quick play sessions and at the hardest level of Insane definitely poses a considerable challenge. Lower levels won’t have you tearing your hair out, but some of them will definitely make you work hard for a perfect rescue. The quick restarts keep it from becoming frustrating and make you want to try, try again to sail just past the planet, snap up your hapless astronaut buddies, and leave no astronaut behind. It’s a fun Mini, and earns 4.5 out of 5 Aeropauseonauts.
Check out Blast Off and other PSP reviews at Test Freaks.

Blast Off was provided for review by the developer.