Can You Master The Revolving Record As You Jump To Survive In Rotato?

Rotato (Free) by Floor 27 Industries is the perfect little game for your iPhone when you have some time to kill. If you like reflex games, similar in the vein of Boson X, Super Hexagon, Pivvot, and Duet Game, you may also enjoy Rotato.

When it comes to my iPhone, I more or less enjoy games that are fun ways to kill a few spare minutes while I wait in line, or commute to the office. While it’s great to have more in-depth games on the platform, such as Bastion, I prefer to play these types of games more when I’m at home, and not really out, when I have to focus on other things. And for me, that’s the reason why I have a ton of little simple pick-up-and-play games on my device, and I am glad to add Rotato to this collection.

To go along with the overall aesthetics of iOS 7, Rotato features flat visuals wrapped in a beautiful dark color scheme with vivid and pastel colors. To go along with the fast-paced game is a catchy soundtrack with a beat that goes along with your own rhythm during the rounds. Plus, it features a retro “scratch” sound that will remind you of when you place vinyl in a record player — this was an incredibly nice touch that I rather enjoyed each time I started a game.

There is only one game mode in Rotato, but that’s all you need. The game’s objective is a rather simple one: last as long as you can. You take control of a single sea foam colored shape whose purpose in life is to move back and forth across the radius of what appears to be a purple record (hence the scratching sounds). Think of this shape as the needle in the record player, because that’s what it essentially is as it moves back and forth. To make your little guy move, just tap on the screen, and it will “jump” from the other edge to the inner circle.

But things are much more complex than just moving back and forth, of course. You will want to collect the yellow coins that appear on the record (in four different layers), as well as some safe-colored stars. There are dangers as well, which come in the form of red stars. If you touch these, it is game over. As I just said, though, not all of the stars are bad. The sea foam stars make you invincible for a short amount of time (red stars get turned into gold stars). If you barely miss hitting the red mines, then your multiplier increases, so try and barely hit those things for the best possible score.

The coins you collect can also be used to purchase power-ups before a new game that will help make the game a bit easier. These power-ups range in their abilities, and can be bought with the coins you end up collecting.

Your final score will consist of two things: score and laps. The score is determined by how long you last and how many close calls you get, and laps means how many full rotations of the record you managed to survive through. These are counted separately, so you will have different high score records for both. There is full Game Center support for competitive players, with both leaderboards and a lot of achievements to obtain.

I’ve been enjoying Rotato quite a bit, as it’s a fun and simple little game that is great to kill some time with. I love the clean graphics, interactive music, and simple-to-learn-difficult-to-master gameplay. However, I am finding the game to be a bit glitchy, as it sometimes does not bring up the power-ups screen and will register a new game but leave the previous round’s scores open, so it obstructs my view. I hope that the developer gets this fixed soon, because other than those little issues, the game is pretty good.

If you’re in the mood for a deceptively fun little game, then I recommend checking out Rotato. Get it in the App Store for your iPhone for free.