Its been a little over a year since we last looked at this application, and it’s changed sufficiently in that time to be worth another review. See the old review here.
Update
An update for Spawn Iluminati was recently approved by Apple. After trying out the latest release I can now happily inform you that the problems relating to Push Notifications causing the App to crash have been resolved.
Original Post
I have owned a copy of Spawn Illuminati since before it ever got into the top 100 list, and Elements Of Design have always put out my favorite apps. My friends all ask me if they can play with this, and although it doesn’t do anything useful, it is loads of fun. I just keep finding myself coming back to it.
The application is basically all about a bunch of colored sparks that follow your finger. When you launch the app, the particles bounce around the screen, follow your fingers, and explode when you double tap.
If that were all it did, I wouldn’t be reviewing it. There are options aplenty in Spawn. Tapping with two fingers enters pause mode, where you can hold your finger down to slowly advance the sparks, taking screenshots when you like. When you tap with three fingers, the sparks pause while a circular menu springs into existence wherever you touched. From that menu, you see a few icons. Each of these when held down or tapped expands into a group of icons which allow you to change different aspects of the particles and how they react to the world.
The first button is easy- the screenshots button. Its very handy for when you might be too slow pressing the sleep and home buttons, because it pauses the particles to take the photo, then stores the picture as a .jpg in the camera roll. In the finger menu, there are a few modes on how the particles will react to your fingers. With disperse mode, the particles try to avoid flying towards your finger. The follow mode, the default, makes the particles try to follow one finger. Swirl mode causes the particles to circle around your finger wherever you move it. Two way follow causes the particles to split into two groups, each group trying to follow one of your touches. The last mode is called two poles, causing the particles fly back and forth between your two fingers. The saved styles menu is a small heart icon which allows you to save several profiles, represented by stars.
The particle effects menu will change the particles tail length, size, color, allow you to lock the color, the number of particles, and much more. After a setting is selected, press ok, and then pinch or spread your fingers to increase or reduce the option.The second to last icon let’s you change how the particles will react to the environment, namely gravity. You can punch this setting up to full to prevent the little guys from ever leaving the ground. The wiggle strength and speed settings are also in this menu. The last menu is the modes menu, where you can enter abstract, blur, sparkle, or symmetry mode. Each of these can be activated separately or layered upon each other. Blur mode makes it feel as if the particles are flying either away or towards you (changeable in the menu as well). There is a microphone option that makes the sparks fly to the beat of music. Abstract mode makes the particles tails never fade, so that the screen quickly becomes filled with a multicolored masterpiece. Symmetry mode is what you would expect, making an amazing kaleidoscope of colored sparks you can interact with. The number of mirrors can be changed to affect the appearance of this mode. The final mode, sparkle, simply makes the particles give off little sparks as they move around.
The geometric beauty of it makes the app Spawn Illuminati one I have kept on my iPod since the day I got it. Unfortunately, it seems that the application crashes every time the device receives a push notification. Until they get this fixed, Spawn Illuminati only gets a rating of worth a look. Normally, this would have disqualified the app from my reviewing queue, as it’s insanely annoying, but it’s been a favorite for so long I decided it deserved some attention. Check it out.
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