Hands on with Godzilab's just launched online space basketball game StarDunk

I have a lot of time for French studio Godzilab. It's continuing decades of national tradition by coming up with crazy game ideas.

Its debut was iBlast Moki, and now it's just release StarDunk, which while being more logically named, is still a fairly wacky concept.

The gameplay is clear however - it's basketball.

You tap and move your finger on the screen to set the trajectory and the power of your throw in order to get the ball into the basket. As with real basketball, there's a backboard you can use for bounce shots.

You're providing with some idea of where your shot will go thanks to a guidance arc.

Your goal is to score as many points as possible, with more points awarded for clean shots through the hoop, and for those that are further away from the basket. The ball's position varies from shot to shot. Your score enables you to unlock and use balls with different characteristics.

So far, so simple.

The weirdness about StarDunk is that Godzilab has combined it with space-based online multiplayer features, so you're throwing your ball in front of the earth - as if you're in space.

There is an offline mode, but the main focus of the game is online.

Here, roughly every two minutes, you'll be thrown into a contest, where you have 120 seconds to score as many points as possible. The earth also highlights where your challengers are located in real-time, which is a nice touch.

At the end of the period, your score is compared with the other players in the contest via global, country-based and friend-based leaderboards.

StarDunk uses the Plus+ social network but it's well integrated so apart from logging on, all the stats are displayed in-game.

So having played the game for an hour or so, there are a couple of aspects to ponder.

The first concerns the gameplay, specifically how challenging it will be longterm.

Granted there are plenty of players with higher scores than me, so although I'm now pretty good at scoring baskets, I guess I'm not yet scoring enough clean shots to rank high. Still, I do wonder how quickly I will get bored.

After all, despite the different types of balls, you're just throwing baskets.

Perhaps more open is the questions of how the social aspect of the game will drive regular play. The leaderboard ranking is good in terms of highlighting the best scores, but I'm not sure how it will drive player interactions for average players in the way that games like We Rule and GodFinger do.

Still, it's an interesting attempt to do something different, and worth checking out.

StarDunk is out now, priced 99c, €0.79 or 59p.

You can see how it plays in the following video.

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