Heavenly Bodies Review (Mannor)
A neat little puzzle game about managing (more or less realistic) astronaut duties in zero gravity.
You control your character’s limbs and have to pull yourself around, grab objects, attach stuff to your suit and interact with levers, buttons, sliding doors and more. Given this, the game’s difficulty comes mostly from its literally floaty controls. The game is divided into levels, each with a new space station location and unique tasks for you to complete, keeping the experience fresh and even telling a basic story.
Heavenly Bodies also challenges you with finding collectibles, fulfilling additional tasks for each level and completing the levels with realistic physics, meaning less room for messing up. Everything can also be experienced in co-op mode, making for even more fun, as up to 4 players stumble around and get in each other’s way. Having only experienced two player co-op, I’d consider that to make for the optimal experience, with four players probably getting in each other’s way too much and being limited by the missions’ design not providing enough to do for everyone at once. That said, I see a lot of potential fun arising from the chaos of trying to coordinate four people stumbling around space.
Graphically, the game looks beautiful, which, alongside the great ambient sound, gives it a unique feel and makes the game surprisingly immersive. The levels are certainly challenging, but manage to not become frustrating either, although I’d recommend taking a pause every couple of levels to relax.
There’s a DLC available for Heavenly Bodies, which essentially gives you another 7 missions to complete, this time around with the added twist of all of them taking place on the same map, which expands as you progress through the missions. While this is obviously a bit more boring, with you having to move through the same space station over and over again, the DLC does a good thing of shaking things up and overall presents a unique spin on the game’s formula, which I quite enjoyed.
That being said, I felt the big map presented throughout the missions to not be ideal for co-op play, as players trying to work on different tasks will quickly leave the shared screen’s boundaries, making for a suboptimal playing experience. Unlike in the main game, there are no additional challenges for the new missions; however, there are once again some collectibles to find around the map, giving you a bit more to do.
All in all, I very much enjoyed Heavenly Bodies and definitely recommend buying it, especially if you have someone else to play it with.