The Story

You play Stellar Escape as Elliot Black, a courier in the Beta sector. But after a courier job goes wrong and you rumble Lord Gulasch’s destructive plans, you’re forced to flee for your life. You’ll only be safe once your reach your ship, but the space station’s security has other ideas…

The Experience

Stellar Escape is a horizontal scroller that sees you running for your life, desperate to get to your spaceship in order to escape. The space station’s security is hell bent on stopping you, however, putting electrified walls, jumps and moving barriers in your way, all of which you must avoid.

And avoidance is achieved by using a combination of the five on-screen action icons: hop, slide, tube, leap and climb. Each obstacle requires a specific action to avoid it and it’s this that make Stellar Escape hugely challenging. Unless you have the reflexes of a 12-year old, you’ll struggle to switch between controls fast enough to avoid all the obstacles. As each obstacle costs you a life, that’s an important thing to make sure you do…

You have three lives in which to complete each of the 15 levels – there’s also an ‘endless mode’ that challenges you to get as far as possible before you use up your lives – and each level, predictably, gets harder.

Graphically, Stellar Escape is super-smooth and well animated. At times the controls aren’t as responsive as you might like, but that’s perhaps just our way of saying we’re old and our reflexes are shot.

Regardless, Stellar Escape will keep you amused for a week or so at least, but it’s not likely to keep you coming back much beyond that thanks to its repetitive nature.

The Bottom Line

Challenging but ultimately lacking in real depth. It’s a novel horizontal scroller that’s marred slightly by repetition. Should be free given the lack of longevity.

Additional Info

Version reviewed 2.07
Requires Android 2.0.1 or higher