Developer: Filppfly
Publisher: Flippfly
Rrp: £6.99 (Steam), £7.99 (Humblebundle) and £8.09 (Gog.com)
Released: 10th December 2013
Available on: Steam, Gog.com and Humblebundle
Played Using: A Xbox 360 Control Pad
As the sun sets it paints the sky with gorgeous hues of reds and oranges and once its gone the soothing dark of night blankets the world. Unfortunately for you the setting sun is an omen of death, the end of all things. Stay in the sunlight! Race the sun and never let it set!
Race the Sun is essentially an endless runner, for those who haven’t heard of this term that means that the game never actually ends, there is no end goal, no real finish line. I mention this because this is the first of its kind I’ve actually reviewed before so I thought it worth a mention.
Now that we have that piece of explanation is out of the way… You control a solar powered vehicle that resembles an airplane. The batteries on your plane don’t last very long so you need to keep in the sunlight as much as possible or you will stop thus ending your run. Crashing also ends your run, in case you hadn’t guessed.
The sun is always setting, meaning that your run always has a timer on it. There is one way to mitigate that though, grab the yellow boost power ups that you see as you zip through the regions. These boosts reverse time slightly and raise the sun. But as the name implies these boosts also speed you up making reacting to the rapidly approaching obstacles that much more difficult to avoid.
As you play you may notice that the world world you race through changes from time to time. This is because it’s procedurally generated, although not in the usual way, this game does things a little differently. The worlds don’t change from run to run but rather after a set amount of time has elapsed, the countdown to which is shown to you once you’ve crashed along with a lot of other stats. The world is split into regions, which are generally quite short. They increase in difficulty the further into the world you get.
All through the regions are scattered translucent blue pyramids, these pyramids are known as tris. The more of these you collect the higher your score multiplier will become. For those of us not really interested in playing a score attack style game they serve no real function (unless they’re involved with a task). If you happen to hit an object and somehow not die the score multiplier you’ve racked up decreases substantially and your vehicle will decrease in speed.
As was mentioned previously the game likes to give you tasks, three at a time to be precise. You can complete these tasks individually though as taking on more than one at once can be very difficult to accomplish.
“Why would I bother completing these tasks?” You may wonder. Well the more tasks you complete the higher your level, which in turn unlocks attachments, decals and game modes that will help you do better in your runs, well not so much the decals, they just add some level of customisation.
Actually if you want to add a level of difficulty for yourself, or perhaps you just like the point of view it gives, you can set the camera to a first person view with the [X] button.
I love the simplicity of the game, everything from the art style to the way the controls respond is designed to be easy to use and understand. It’s also what makes the game quite addictive, I’d been playing this game on and off for nearly a year before I decided to review it.
You’d be right in thinking that since I’ve been playing this game on and off for so long that I clearly will view it favourably. I wholeheartedly admit that. Any game that can get me to keep replaying it over and over for a year clearly has to have some merit.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Audiosurf
Thumper
No Thing
