A wonderful sandbox – SPACE by THIX Review

This game is really incredible because it can take the sophistication of astrophysics and give you simple tools to navigate and control the a galaxy. It’s really beautiful. I went into an Apple store where SPACE was installed on the display iPads. On a 2017 iPad Pro 12.9 this game was incredibly fluid. It’s simple UI didn’t need any explanation, I was immediately setting up planets and stars and black holes. I was really taken aback by how cool this app was. Knowing that part of the appeal of this app is the simplicity, I could understand not wanting to mess with it too much. But there are some functions that I think would really make this a lot more fun: 1. The ability to speed up time. Somethings I want to just see if a certain cluster I made is going to be fine in the long term. I like to experience the early parts of a forming start system, but there are other times where I just want to see the ‘end game’ of it. 2. Menu to hide the names and/or paths of the planets and stars. This seems to make everything really crowded when zoomed out. 3. Menu option to set ‘selecting distance’ or something to that effect. There are a lot of times when I’m editing and rotating the camera around a system, one of my swipes to rotate is interpreted as moving a blue giant 200 billion miles away. If I’m zoomed in on a system, i want to be editing only that system. This a a really fun game. I’m the biggest issue for me is that once I get to around 20 stars/planets, it requires more power than my iPhone 7 can provide without draining the battery or getting hot. I understand that incorporating my “time speed up” idea would likely put even more strain on the phone, having to calculate the gravity of the galaxy at 2000 times the speed it normally does. But it runs great on the current generation of phones.
Review by Rettun1 on SPACE by THIX.