Sky Rider Reviews

This game has potential, but it suffers from several flaws that make it impossible to recommend. (EDIT: This is still my opinion but I want to clarify a few things) To give a basic description of the game, it's a procedural endless runner with wall-running mechanics. You hit start and are already going, flying forward at a rate of speed that slowly increases as time goes on. The goal is to run for as long as possible. You can't hit the ground or go flying head-long into buildings; instead your goal is to hit the [i]walls[/i] of buildings that run parallel to your character. When you do, the character will run along them, and when you reach the end of the wall the character will auto jump. When that happens, you move left and right to try and hit another wall, your character will run along it, etc., etc. Your only controls are left and right on the A and D keys and (bafflingly) your mouse, which controls the camera. (I don't recommend moving the camera.) The controls being simple is absolutely fine (though, again, I question the camera controls), but the glaring flaws I mentioned make this game very difficult, if not impossible, to play. 1) Spawning: --Though you usually (but not always!) start with buildings close enough to you for a wall-run when you actually begin playing, resets are another matter. *EDIT: When you begin the first spawn of a run, you are consistently placed on a little runway, giving yourself some time to react and plan. In later respawns, you can actually see the runway but you are not on it.* I sometimes wait for 10-30 seconds so a good enough spawn point would show up and I could actually play the game again. I would spawn, see that the buildings were too far away to hope to reach them, and go "Well, let's hope after a few spawns it'll fix itself." Even holding down left or right before the restart, attempting to get enough distance for VERY far-away buildings, didn't necessarily guarantee a solid wall-run, and of course it's almost impossible to guess if the building would be on the far right or left. I know this game uses procedural generation for the cityscapes, which is very cool and ambitious, but the start needs to be working every time or the game becomes frustrating. *EDIT: Again, I think the runway was supposed to fix this but it doesn't spawn you correctly on it every time.* --Even mid-game, sometimes the buildings will be arranged in such a way that you can't avoid crashes if you want to get a wall-run--they'll be packed too closely together or be arranged in such a way as to get in your way. The Slums map was quite unforgiving about spawning L-shaped buildings, which were essentially traps (the wall-run leads directly to a crash and is difficult to avoid), buildings that are too wide to get to the side of, etc. If you've bought this game (which I don't recommend!), start with the third map; it's the easiest to get into and often has better spawns and better building setups than the other two maps. 2) Bad character/wall interactions: --There were many instances where I thought I might be able to hit the wall and I was just barely too far away or too close, and got punished for it. This might be an intended difficulty choice, and maybe I just need to "git gud" but it feels too difficult to be fun. (When I asked my friend to try it, he found it difficult as well and he's actually pretty decent at twitch reactions and platformers.) Developer, if you're reading this, having even the slightest snap to the wall would be incredibly helpful. *EDIT: With more experimentation I found that there is the tiniest bit of snapping, but it's so minuscule it doesn't help. The way you clip into buildings and get punished for it seems to be an attempt to "fix" interactions with clusters of buildings that spawn too close together but it's still frustrating.* --Even if you're coming towards the middle of a wall, and you feel you should be able to get a good run along it, pushing in the wall's direction will crash you. Why? Holding the button towards the wall to run along it feels intuitive and is a common wall-run/wall-jump control in other games. Having that be punished so hard in this game confuses me. --Your character can't run along any kind of diagonal or curve. This isn't so bad in two of the maps, but in the third map there are tons of buildings with a curve or diagonal that faces the character. Some forgiveness/leniency in that area would be great (or just facing those parts of buildings away from the player). --Clips into buildings can sometimes be oddly too forgiving, where the building you crashed into will disappear and you'll end up just running along the "floor" and being forced to react when you thought you'd already lost. 3) Non-working or unfinished gameplay features: --Character customization is meant to be a reward you can unlock with points from accomplishing challenges. However, not all the customization options are even in the game (eye color reads "coming soon"), and the game doesn't seem to remember my customization accurately every time. I hadn't unlocked anything at this point, but I had the option to set the character's hair to white instead of black. After setting it to white and starting the game, I crashed and the hair reset to black. --I also was extremely unclear on the hearts/crashing mechanisms; the hearts would go down if I clipped buildings without managing a wall-run, but sometimes I'd crash with 3 hearts and still be forced to restart. I'm sure some of these mechanisms are working as intended, but rather than being a polished addition to a working and enjoyable game, they were an extra set of questions in an already confusing mess. *--EDIT: Some of the other menu features work unintuitively or seem straight-up broken. I've had challenges reset to the lowest difficulty or go back a level when I've completed them in a session, and it seems to be a toss-up when loading up the game from scratch. I'm unsure of how the menu to select your level and challenge works (is it possible to do both? I feel like I either get to select challenge or level and never both because selecting one or the other starts your run). Not many options, though I do appreciate the separate sliders for the different aspects of the sound--you have voice, music, and sound effects, and they all seem to work and remember your settings, so kudos.* I don't know if this is a sincere attempt at development or a cynical asset flip, but either way it just isn't working very well at this point. I'd love to see an update that fixes some of these things, but I can't recommend it to anyone in its current state unless they want a broken, finicky game.