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World Exclusive Preview: Space Ark

Strawdog Studios might be small, but they’re about to make a very large splash on Xbox Live Arcade. For two and a half years, the five-strong team have been working away on a compelling, addictive and fun game called Space Ark. It's a game that’s at once a throwback to classic arcade games of yore and a wholly new challenge.

The idea is pleasantly simple: a group of space-exploring animals (‘Arkonauts’) have lost their various homes because of a black hole and now they must roam through space, terraforming new planets to serve as suitable environments. In order to do this, you need to complete two different objectives within each stage – collect all the DNA blocks and achieve a target number of combos.

The best way of describing it is to use the game’s biggest influence, arcade classic Arkanoid, a fact that technical director Simon Morris freely admits. (The Strawdog team wear their influences on their sleeves and they have every right to be proud of it.) Essentially, you’re controlling a pad and attempting to bounce the ball around and collect all the objects on the screen, but that’s really where the similarity ends. This is more like Arkanoid with an adrenaline shot directly in the eyeballs.

Hundreds of things can be happening at any one time on screen. Your animal bounces higher and higher with simple flicks upward, all the while collecting colour-coded DNA blocks. A combo chain of between three and fifteen will create a piece of fruit that adds to your multiplier, sending you score ever higher, with each block of DNA appearing in a different colour and being worth a different amount of points. At the same time, you can be rewarded with bonuses for catching special falling pellets – rewards like machine gun attachments, a wider pad, and a shield to catch falling objects for you. Each combo you get is strung along behind the Arkonaut, creating a long tail effect. Miss the pad and your combos begin to float away, sending you into a mad scramble to gather them all back up again. Later levels have more complex obstacles, as well as a target field that warps and tilts, adding extra madness to the fun. It really is a psychedelic, multicoloured feast for the eyes.