JETRUNNER

hella fun

good

👍

The name of the game refers to a competition involving obstacle courses where you perform parkour with the help of your abilities. There are six chapters, each set in a different environment and featuring ten stages that you must complete in order.. Although there are conversations between the main character, her friend, and the commentator during the stages, the focus is really on the fun and challenging courses. Your abilities are not that different from those in a typical first person game. Besides movement, you can jump and perform an air dash that works both on the ground and in the air. It needs to recharge after each use, but this only takes a second. There is also wall running, which triggers automatically when you jump into a wall while keeping your view forward. Special abilities come into play when you pick up their icons, which are always placed at preset locations to help you tackle each course. The first is a gun that you use to shoot targets along the track. This is the most important ability because if you miss even one target, the finish line remains locked and you cannot complete the run until you shoot them all. The number of targets required to unlock the exit is always shown, but the gun comes with a limited amount of ammunition that does not respawn, so you need to be accurate. You also need to pay attention to the targets' colors. Blue targets are harmless, while red ones fire back at you and remove one of your three health points. Some also need to be shot more time, but you can take them out in many different ways, not just with a gun. If you lose all your health, you return to the starting line. The same happens if you fall into water or another hazard surrounding the obstacle course. The other power ups do not respawn either, and they are even more important because each one can only be used once. One launches you into the air, another functions as a grappling hook, and there are a few other surprises. If you waste a power up, it is often easier to restart the stage and try again, although you can complete most stages with some creative parkour at the cost of a slower time. If you only care about progressing through the stages, your time does not matter and you can take as long as you need. However, with a bit of effort, it is possible to earn a bronze or even a silver medal. Gold, on the other hand, requires a nearly perfect run. You need to find shortcuts and make use of elements around the course, such as platforms holding signs that are not part of the intended route, which is marked by indicators on the ground and walls. Fortunately, you will discover many of these faster routes while searching for the hidden coin found in every level. This encourages exploration because the coins are always located off the main path and often require you to spend a power up to reach them. Once collected, however, they are yours to keep and you do not need to finish the stage for them to count. Collecting bonus coins unlocks extra tracks.

A delicious source of fast-paced, speedrunning movement with plenty of shortcuts to find and a decent number of levels to master. Instant recommendation for any first-person parkour or movement shooter fans. Keep in mind though that the game struggles with balancing its basic/fast routes and the story falls flat. While the quality of levels never drops throughout the game, the process of acquiring the highest rank in a level does slowly begin to take it too far. You can get a gold rank on almost every level on your first successful run, but later levels’ diamond medals can take a lot of attempts to nail. Similarly, finding each level's secret token gets overly complicated the further into the game you get. Eventually, I decided to walk away from the idea of one-hundred-percenting the game despite very much enjoying finding most of the optimizations and tokens. A little more balance in these regions would've pushed Jetrunner ahead of other games in this sphere. Delivering the story through the courses’ speakers during gameplay (as opposed to, say, putting it all into an embarrassingly bland visual novel *cough *cough) was a smart choice. However, the stadium commentator’s big stalker energy was downright creepy. What there is for a story basically doesn’t go anywhere and ends without a resolution or direction. It’s easily the weakest part of an otherwise very competent game.

Fast-paced parkour game with incredibly well-made mechanics and movement. Art style of 3D and 2D objects was incredible, imo. The story was interesting as well. I always stood still on my first attempt at every level to hear the voice lines. [spoiler] Is the ending hinting a sequel or just down to earth? Not everything needs a big climax, but it still felt off ending the game with the mc losing hard. [/spoiler]

hell yea