Price: $3.99     Score: 8/10    Category: Games

Developed by Digital Frog, Space Frontier is an engaging, story-driven sim for the hardcore mobile gamer.

In Space Frontier it’s the year 2150 and Earth is no longer habitable and it has fallen to you to find and colonize new planets. Achieving this task will see you discover 30 different planets, which form the basis of 40 unique and challenging stages.

To get started you’ll need to set up an account from within the game, which is as simple as selecting your language and choosing a nickname. Once you’ve synced once with the Space Frontier server, you’re good to go.

There is a strong story element in Space Frontier, which is enacted by anime-style characters and a lot of speech bubbles. If you’re someone who likes to jump straight into the action you may find the inability to skip these story-sequences a little frustrating. Due to the translation from Korean to English, there are also a number of grammatical errors that might annoy some players.

The game itself involves completing a mission within a specified time period, in what is best described as some kind of galactic building-competition between yourself and a man named Felipe.

Each mission has a number of tasks to be completed, which generally include building or upgrading a number of houses, or earning a certain amount of money. Once completed, you move on to the next mission.

To build or upgrade a house you require robots, which can only be used on one objective at a time. Once they’ve been tasked to build for example, they can’t be used elsewhere. There are a number of in-app-purchases that can be bought to speed up the waiting game, but none of these are required to play.

In addition to robots, you also need minerals to build houses. Minerals are bought, and if you don’t have enough cash then you have the option of selling houses and waiting for a buyer to give you the right price.

As Space Frontier is a game about colonizing distant worlds, there is of course an ever-present risk of being hit by an asteroid, and you need to keep an eye on the ‘safety meter’ and spend enough money on protection to keep your new city safe.

Bottom Line: Space Frontier is a challenging game in a distinctly Korean style, and if you’re a fan of the genre then you’ll find this title very rewarding.

Space Frontier is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 3.0 or later.