Welcome to From the Garage, TGR’s weekly feature spotlighting Xbox Live Community Games and independent development. Given the enormous amount of content that is hitting the marketplace, we’ll keep you clear of the garbage and point you in the direction of treasure. This week, we feature Light Catcher.
Light Catcher is another fairly simplistic Community Game. In it, you’ll be controlling what appears to be a little field goal at the bottom of the screen, while being tasked with collecting colored balls that fall downward from the top of the screen. Once you collect three different colored balls, you’ll receive points. The object of the game is to collect a certain amount of points before you run of out time. If you succeed, the bar is raised and the game starts anew, otherwise you fail and have to start over again.
The twist in the gameplay that keeps the game somewhat interesting is the dark/bright meter. Each of the colors naturally has a different brightness to them — yellow is bright, while navy blue is dark. As the name suggests, getting a brighter color will yield you more points (though darker colors will still give you some).
Also included are two different power-ups. The first is one that makes all of the colored balls brighter, making point scoring that much easier. The other power-up speeds up the flow of colored balls, allowing you to collect more balls and more points. The problem with the “speed up” power is that the balls probably move a little too fast, making it not only hard to gather the balls up, but personally made me nauseous.
Light Catcher also comes complete with offline multiplayer, but it is essentially the same game and only adds a second person to the mix. You can play co-operatively or compete against a friend for the highest score.
All in all, Light Catcher is simplistic and doesn’t have a whole heck of a lot of meat on its bones. It is reasonably priced at 200 Microsoft Points ($2.50), but there’s nothing included in the package that makes it compelling enough to drop any amount of money on.
Verdict: Avoid It
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