Subtle, captivating, addictive. These three words describe the world of Sparkle - world in which you make a tiny aquatic creature evolve into becoming a grown, magnificent being. We give you control over your Sparkle's development and wellbeing, and you have one goal - to evolve. Whilst exploring the Sparkle Void, you find various nutritious elements to eat. Sometimes you will even have to fight for food with other species. You become what you eat - you get to choose whether your sparkle becomes a fast and aggressive carnivore, a sluggish but fast-eating herbivore, or an omnivore, whose features lie somewhere in between. Insight to your Sparkle's DNA strand will give you information about the progress and will help you plan which microelements you want to focus on eating next. You will also get to fight giant bosses from time to time. But there’s no rush to keep the game in full swing at all times.
The visuals are very nice, and I loved Flow, so I was pretty interested in this game. Unfortunately the controls are pretty poor. Very unresponsive. It acts as if it's still taking your last input a full second after you let go or change direction. There's actually a lot about the controls that make it feel frustrating, not only because of strange lack of action where it should have some, but because of awkward collision with the environment. Flow was a lot more polished in the area of controls, which I have to say is a very major area.
The evolution seems decent, and the audio is pretty good. I would have a hard time suggesting someone buys this whether you have Flow or not. But yeah, there's a demo. Check it out for yourself. If a patch comes out that polishes the controls (which I think wouldn't be a very difficult patch to get together), I could see this being a pretty good game (8/10), clone or not.