Orbit Drift: Gravity Slingshot

Orbit Drift is a gravity game about flying closer to things than you should. Your ship never stops. Hold the screen to burn harder, and steer with where your thumb sits. Every planet, star and black hole is pulling on you the whole time.

You score by grazing. Pass near a planet without touching it and it pays, and the closer the pass, the more it pays. Graze something that would have killed you on contact, a star or a black hole, and it pays twenty times as much. The biggest grazes are a gravity slingshot past something deadly, and one touch ends the run.

Grazes build heat. Heat is the only multiplier, and it also sets your speed, so a good run gets faster as it goes. Take a hit and the heat goes out, and the multiplier and the speed go with it. Nothing is banked: points land on your score the moment you earn them.

Thread the gap between two bodies, skim a moon by a few pixels, or ram an enemy and destroy it, and time slows down for the stunt.

Every run rolls a new seed, so this is a gravity game you cannot learn by heart: nobody else has flown your universe, and you will not fly it twice. The wormholes land somewhere new on every seed, so the wormhole game starts over each run. Endless space holds six kinds of body: asteroids, moons, planets, large planets, stars and black holes. Asteroids can be shoved aside, but every one you hit costs you speed. A slingshot space game needs something to swing off, and here it is the moons: they orbit their planets, and a slingshot off a moving one adds real speed. That gravity slingshot is how a good run finds its pace. Stars and black holes kill on contact, so space is most dangerous exactly where it pays most.

Wormholes come in linked pairs, and the wormhole game rewards finding new ones: the first crossing of each pays 500 points, and every trip back through the same one pays half as much again.

Seven kinds of enemy shoot at you, and you see the muzzle flash and hear the shot before the bullet arrives. Trails of five hearts mark a route with the rocks cleared out of it, and each heart repairs a fifth of your hull. Fourteen power-ups turn up along the way, including an antigravity orb that flips gravity and throws you out of a well.

There are 20 ships to win in Orbit Drift, and 19 of them have an ability of their own. The Cat flies on nine hearts instead of hull points. The Old Phone has twice the hull of the starter ship, which is plain on purpose so you can tell what the others add. Ships and the 12 trinkets are won at the portal, in a fishing minigame you pay for in coins: cast, wait for the bite, reel it in. Each trinket is a permanent ability from the moment you own it, and a duplicate turns into coins.

Tilt steering is in Settings if you would rather tilt the phone. The camera pulls back as you speed up, so the faster you cross endless space, the further ahead you can see. Danger warnings sit at the edge of the screen, nearest first. If you have never played a slingshot space game, a short tutorial on a fixed course starts you off.

Your best score goes on the Google Play Games leaderboard, and there are 13 achievements. A finished run can be shared as a poster card with your score and ship.

When you run out of lives you can watch an ad for 10 more or buy 100. Flying works offline. The leaderboard, achievements, ads and purchases need a connection.

Every sprite in the game, from the smallest asteroid to the black holes, is pixel art drawn for Orbit Drift.