Well, this game is very strange, I can't explain it, it seems like this game was made to farm the peak of this extreme sport, only they made it boring and stressful.
First of all, the design is ok, but some of the textures seemed to be a bit stale and there were a lot of bugs.
The controls of the game are strange, in order to jump you need to click on the ball button and this takes away the habit of jumping on the X button which leads to errors that preclude the challenges. In addition, the buttons often don't work properly, for example in the tutorial you need to jump and then fall with style, however the damn game didn't realize that I was clicking on the right button which made me want to leave the game.
The design of the stages is generic, especially the gym, which is literally basic for learning how to play. For me, the house was the most interesting because it's more chill, but it has an orange filter like the Mexico scenes in Breaking Bad, only a thousand times worse, and the backround is so ugly it gave me an eye sore.
In short, please don't play only if you want to suffer or like this extreme sport.
First of all, the design is ok, but some of the textures seemed to be a bit stale and there were a lot of bugs.
The controls of the game are strange, in order to jump you need to click on the ball button and this takes away the habit of jumping on the X button which leads to errors that preclude the challenges. In addition, the buttons often don't work properly, for example in the tutorial you need to jump and then fall with style, however the damn game didn't realize that I was clicking on the right button which made me want to leave the game.
The design of the stages is generic, especially the gym, which is literally basic for learning how to play. For me, the house was the most interesting because it's more chill, but it has an orange filter like the Mexico scenes in Breaking Bad, only a thousand times worse, and the backround is so ugly it gave me an eye sore.
In short, please don't play only if you want to suffer or like this extreme sport.
Who is this for? Extreme sports games fans who are looking for a different sport and are willing to put up with some issues. Expect Tony Hawk with a 3D platformer.
Too flawed to be under rated and too unique to be written off. It was developed by the same studio as Tomb Raider and you can tell, the character control feels excellent but wrestling with the camera to navigate the underwhelming stages is no treat. There's a decent amount of fun to be had here, it's weird how satisfying rattling off button combos to do some fancy twirling is.
The PC port is prone to weird audio glitches, I've had a few times where the sprint sound effect continued long after I stopped, and I had to quit the game then relaunch.
Too flawed to be under rated and too unique to be written off. It was developed by the same studio as Tomb Raider and you can tell, the character control feels excellent but wrestling with the camera to navigate the underwhelming stages is no treat. There's a decent amount of fun to be had here, it's weird how satisfying rattling off button combos to do some fancy twirling is.
The PC port is prone to weird audio glitches, I've had a few times where the sprint sound effect continued long after I stopped, and I had to quit the game then relaunch.
Bought a Retroid Pocket 4 Pro recently and I decided to test it by revisiting one of my childhood favorites. I never see anybody else talk about this game, and nobody knows what the fuck I'm on whenever I start to talk about it, so here I am.
This is a third person parkour platformer game where you run and traverse through the urban jungle in style, not only running, jumping or climbing fast, but also doing tricks like you would in a Tony Hawk game.
It's mostly set in a vaguely London-esque scenery, as the devs take inspiration from the local parkour scene. Abandoned flats, breezy docksides, multi-story construction sites; basically the kind of places you would expect somebody with a need for adrenaline rush to take advantage of. A lot of the levels have this strong orange sunset lighting, and it creates a decisively romantic feel. It's like little old me playing with the neighbor kids in the afternoon all over again, and it's a delightful feeling.
The levels themselves are pretty well designed, with a good progression of complexity and stakes as you go on, with failure resulting in falling from even greater heights and/or losing more precious time in races. There's a couple times where the obstacles can feel a bit awkward in how you traverse them, but it's not very often.
In each level, you usually have a number of challenges to complete in order to progress to the next level. The first activity you'll unlock is Freestyle, where you can explore the level and familiarize yourself with the help of mini-challenges, before tackling the other longer challenges. These challenges include the usual time trials, racing against an AI runner, collecting medals, and so on. A particularly fun twist is the Ground Zero challenges, where you are not allowed to touch the floor. All the activities are good for the most part, and they are usually designed in such a way to take you through paths that you'll most likely miss during free roam.
The only kind of challenge that I don't like is the Crash Tests, where you control a crash dummy and try to wreck him up as much as possible by running into explosives. It doesn't have the same kind of thrills that the others offer, and it's quite random since the physics can behave erratically, resulting in the occasional frustration because the dummy didn't hit the explosives like you had imagined.
A lot of the challenges have a bronze-silver-gold tier according to how well you did, whether it's by scoring enough style points or going fast enough. There's some unlockable gear locked behind the higher tiers, and these affect how fast you are, and also how susceptible you are to damage from failing fall landings or tricks. For the most part, the stat progression feels incremental since you get better gear at a slow-ish pace, but it does make a noticeable difference in the end.
The controls feel quite weighty and deliberate; its certainly different from games like Mirror's Edge, where you can perform speedy manuevers whenever you feel like it. It can take some time to learn how it wants you to behave, and the movement can feel a bit slippery, especially when you're trying to tackle a narrow angle jump, but the results are satisfying. I especially love doing a trick over a huge gap and successfully nailing the break fall landing. When you're falling from any height, you have to either press Square or Cross to roll or land carefully respectively, and its a small but important mechanic that sets the tone for the game's grounded feel.
But there is an important flaw in the gameplay: the camera kinda sucks. It always moves to follow where you're going, and it can really mess up your movement sometimes. The field of view is also on the low side, and this only exacerbates the previous issue.
To close this review out, I have to shout out the soundtrack. It's a collection of warm and lush electronic dance-able tunes that strikes a nice balance between being exciting and tense but also playful. There's some nice chill tracks too here and there. These would fit nicely in a Lumines game.
I'm hoping I convinced at least one of you to check this out. Maybe then I would know if I'm just crazy, I feel like I'm the only one loving this game haha. Either way, it's been great to revisit this game. In hindsight, this game is pretty much instrumental in deciding the kinds of games I would be obsessed with these days. Probably the biggest reason why I love climbing or parkour mechanics in games like Uncharted so much.
This is a third person parkour platformer game where you run and traverse through the urban jungle in style, not only running, jumping or climbing fast, but also doing tricks like you would in a Tony Hawk game.
It's mostly set in a vaguely London-esque scenery, as the devs take inspiration from the local parkour scene. Abandoned flats, breezy docksides, multi-story construction sites; basically the kind of places you would expect somebody with a need for adrenaline rush to take advantage of. A lot of the levels have this strong orange sunset lighting, and it creates a decisively romantic feel. It's like little old me playing with the neighbor kids in the afternoon all over again, and it's a delightful feeling.
The levels themselves are pretty well designed, with a good progression of complexity and stakes as you go on, with failure resulting in falling from even greater heights and/or losing more precious time in races. There's a couple times where the obstacles can feel a bit awkward in how you traverse them, but it's not very often.
In each level, you usually have a number of challenges to complete in order to progress to the next level. The first activity you'll unlock is Freestyle, where you can explore the level and familiarize yourself with the help of mini-challenges, before tackling the other longer challenges. These challenges include the usual time trials, racing against an AI runner, collecting medals, and so on. A particularly fun twist is the Ground Zero challenges, where you are not allowed to touch the floor. All the activities are good for the most part, and they are usually designed in such a way to take you through paths that you'll most likely miss during free roam.
The only kind of challenge that I don't like is the Crash Tests, where you control a crash dummy and try to wreck him up as much as possible by running into explosives. It doesn't have the same kind of thrills that the others offer, and it's quite random since the physics can behave erratically, resulting in the occasional frustration because the dummy didn't hit the explosives like you had imagined.
A lot of the challenges have a bronze-silver-gold tier according to how well you did, whether it's by scoring enough style points or going fast enough. There's some unlockable gear locked behind the higher tiers, and these affect how fast you are, and also how susceptible you are to damage from failing fall landings or tricks. For the most part, the stat progression feels incremental since you get better gear at a slow-ish pace, but it does make a noticeable difference in the end.
The controls feel quite weighty and deliberate; its certainly different from games like Mirror's Edge, where you can perform speedy manuevers whenever you feel like it. It can take some time to learn how it wants you to behave, and the movement can feel a bit slippery, especially when you're trying to tackle a narrow angle jump, but the results are satisfying. I especially love doing a trick over a huge gap and successfully nailing the break fall landing. When you're falling from any height, you have to either press Square or Cross to roll or land carefully respectively, and its a small but important mechanic that sets the tone for the game's grounded feel.
But there is an important flaw in the gameplay: the camera kinda sucks. It always moves to follow where you're going, and it can really mess up your movement sometimes. The field of view is also on the low side, and this only exacerbates the previous issue.
To close this review out, I have to shout out the soundtrack. It's a collection of warm and lush electronic dance-able tunes that strikes a nice balance between being exciting and tense but also playful. There's some nice chill tracks too here and there. These would fit nicely in a Lumines game.
I'm hoping I convinced at least one of you to check this out. Maybe then I would know if I'm just crazy, I feel like I'm the only one loving this game haha. Either way, it's been great to revisit this game. In hindsight, this game is pretty much instrumental in deciding the kinds of games I would be obsessed with these days. Probably the biggest reason why I love climbing or parkour mechanics in games like Uncharted so much.
Free Running doesn't commit to the jump.
Despite its continued prevalence in the 00's, the growth of "skater culture" in the popular consciousness was more of a 90's phenomenon; the 00's were all about parkour. Parkour-style maneuvers continue to be a feature in a wide variety of video games today. Parkour is virtually never the actual focus of these games, just one mechanic in a game with many others, always with a more fantastical setting and stakes than athleticism itself. Somewhere in the middle, during the extreme sports game boom, there surely should have been a game focused squarely on parkour.
Free Running, from the studio best known for Sniper Elite, is the only game of this type that I could find. It appears to have initially released only in Europe and Australia, not making to the US until it was ported to the Wii in 2010, and was eventually released on Steam in 2019. In 2007 the game was already a little late, a PS2 game in a post-PS3 world, coming out the same year that Assassin's Creed would basically declare parkour itself insufficient to carry a game on its own. Compare the box art of the PS2 and PSP versions to the new art that has been used since the Wii (the box art used on this page). Not only does this mark the general cultural shift, in only a few short years the public idea of parkour changing, but also it's another example of what I talked about in my review of The Sky Crawlers; trying to find hidden gems in the Wii library is basically impossible because even "core" titles try to blend in with party and fitness games.
Not that Free Running is a hidden gem by any means, frankly it's pretty rough. The game sort of takes on the control scheme, structure, and format of the post-Tony Hawk extreme sports games that came before it, but does so completely without grace or style. The simple function of each button is up for debate: X is a sort of "balance" button, A is a sort of "grab" button, Y is usually jump, and the shoulders are for special moves, but beyond this you may as well be memorizing random patterns. The difficulty in platforming doesn't come from actually performing any maneuver, it comes from managing the impact, but how you do this is completely inconsistent. Some actions (grabbing poles, for example) will happen completely automatically, others will happen automatically but penalize you for not timing a button press, and others won't happen at all without that button press. Sometimes you need to press the X button (such as recovering from a fall), sometimes you need to press the A button (such as when grabbing ledges) but there is no intuitive rhyme or reason to most of the expected inputs.
The sort of atemporal product design of the Wii release's packaging betrays the actual aesthetic of the game, in retrospect it paints a surprisingly bleak picture, intentionally or otherwise. The very implication of the term "free" running, as opposed to some other kind, should make one consider what kinds of shifts had to occur in our society for the space once occupied by skateboarding, usually characterized as a form of both self-expression and rebellion, is now taken up by normal human movement. Pro Skater has the player begin in abandoned warehouses, schools, malls. Outside of the tutorial gymnasium, the first level of Free Running is a city rooftop. The freeway is visible in the skybox, traffic is at a standstill, blocked by police cars. The name of the level is simply "home".
Despite its continued prevalence in the 00's, the growth of "skater culture" in the popular consciousness was more of a 90's phenomenon; the 00's were all about parkour. Parkour-style maneuvers continue to be a feature in a wide variety of video games today. Parkour is virtually never the actual focus of these games, just one mechanic in a game with many others, always with a more fantastical setting and stakes than athleticism itself. Somewhere in the middle, during the extreme sports game boom, there surely should have been a game focused squarely on parkour.
Free Running, from the studio best known for Sniper Elite, is the only game of this type that I could find. It appears to have initially released only in Europe and Australia, not making to the US until it was ported to the Wii in 2010, and was eventually released on Steam in 2019. In 2007 the game was already a little late, a PS2 game in a post-PS3 world, coming out the same year that Assassin's Creed would basically declare parkour itself insufficient to carry a game on its own. Compare the box art of the PS2 and PSP versions to the new art that has been used since the Wii (the box art used on this page). Not only does this mark the general cultural shift, in only a few short years the public idea of parkour changing, but also it's another example of what I talked about in my review of The Sky Crawlers; trying to find hidden gems in the Wii library is basically impossible because even "core" titles try to blend in with party and fitness games.
Not that Free Running is a hidden gem by any means, frankly it's pretty rough. The game sort of takes on the control scheme, structure, and format of the post-Tony Hawk extreme sports games that came before it, but does so completely without grace or style. The simple function of each button is up for debate: X is a sort of "balance" button, A is a sort of "grab" button, Y is usually jump, and the shoulders are for special moves, but beyond this you may as well be memorizing random patterns. The difficulty in platforming doesn't come from actually performing any maneuver, it comes from managing the impact, but how you do this is completely inconsistent. Some actions (grabbing poles, for example) will happen completely automatically, others will happen automatically but penalize you for not timing a button press, and others won't happen at all without that button press. Sometimes you need to press the X button (such as recovering from a fall), sometimes you need to press the A button (such as when grabbing ledges) but there is no intuitive rhyme or reason to most of the expected inputs.
The sort of atemporal product design of the Wii release's packaging betrays the actual aesthetic of the game, in retrospect it paints a surprisingly bleak picture, intentionally or otherwise. The very implication of the term "free" running, as opposed to some other kind, should make one consider what kinds of shifts had to occur in our society for the space once occupied by skateboarding, usually characterized as a form of both self-expression and rebellion, is now taken up by normal human movement. Pro Skater has the player begin in abandoned warehouses, schools, malls. Outside of the tutorial gymnasium, the first level of Free Running is a city rooftop. The freeway is visible in the skybox, traffic is at a standstill, blocked by police cars. The name of the level is simply "home".