Osmos is an absolutely essential purchase for anyone with an iPad. It demonstrates an acute understanding of how to design a game in which you can become totally immersed and is perfect to relax with. Though it is a port, it only goes to show you that the large multitouch surface of the iPad has a profound impact on how a game can play. It’s no slouch in the gameplay department either, offering up a variety of modes that complement each other extremely well; and as the main campaign (known as the Odyssey) cycles through all eight of them you don’t feel like you’re doing the same thing over and over again. One you complete it, you can play these levels through again at your leisure through the Arcade option, complete with harder difficulty settings. You get 72 levels in total which is great value for the paltry £2.99 that you’re paying for this gem.

The core of the game is simple; although we’ve seen a number of games explore this concept of absorbing other organisms in order to grow bigger, none of them feel as organic as Osmos. If you collide with a smaller mote you’ll often absorb it completely, unless you’re not on a direct path; you may only absorb half of it. Similarly, if you collide with a larger red mote than you’ll have to restart the level, but if you graze one of its sides then you can usually carry on albeit slightly smaller.

Each mote is a fully animated glob of primordial ooze that looks like it holds a microcosm inside itself...

Ultimately, you will find yourself swallowing up much of the motes that surround you to become the biggest organism on screen; this is how the level is won. It starts off fairly simply with just larger and smaller motes but as you progress through the game you find more intelligent life that has more in common with you than you’d expect. Some motes will hunt out smaller ones in order to become huge; others will shy away from you; some spawn small motes occasionally; and others will repel any motes nearing their magnetic field.

Part of the fun comes from the fact that you have to expend some of your mass in order to propel yourself forward or slow down. Simply by tapping on the screen you eject a tiny mote which can bounce off the field walls and return to you, or indeed land in one of the larger motes onscreen. You have to balance building up some kind of speed with losing too much mass and therefore not being able to absorb the larger motes around you.

We especially liked the solar system levels in which you are orbiting a large attractor in the centre; stray too far off this orbit and you may be pulled into a collision course. These levels are extremely dynamic; if you don’t play them right you’ll often get a large red mote orbiting faster and faster around the attractor sucking up everything in its path. This is where the dynamic time warping comes in handy; like Braid the slowdown/speedup alters the pitch of the backing track, and being simply controlled with a finger swipe on the screen it is extremely intuitive. Slowing the level down allows you to have a fine level of control over where exactly you’re going, and helps avoid unwanted collisions.

Plus, the game also incorporates pinch to zoom that again affords you a superb level of control. When combined with all of the other gestures, it becomes clear that the game was thoroughly thought out, and really fun to play.

What really makes this game outstanding isn’t just the fluid controls but also the presentation which is simply spectacular. When zoomed in fully, you can see a particle trail emitting from your mote; absorption is indicated with the contact points glowing brightly; each mote is a fully animated glob of primordial ooze that looks like it holds a microcosm inside itself; and the colour palette for the whole game is sublime. Not only this but Osmos also has a fantastic ambient soundtrack, some of which you can catch on the embedded trailer. It, like the soundtrack for Zen Bound 2, lends a peaceful atmosphere and there are enough tracks in there to keep the game feeling fresh.

There’s nothing here that we didn’t like; save for a lack of freeze game and no option to play your own music. Osmos feels like it was conceived for the iPad from the start; we can’t stress enough how much the multitouch interface adds to the experience. When combined with a super slick presentation that looks amazing in screenshots, plenty of content to explore, and 13 lucky OpenFeint achievements to collect we think it’s indeed worth £2.99. And then some. In a word, remarkable.

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