The Impact Factor

Just a Bit More

Review

Race the Sun, Flippfly (PSVITA)

Abstract: Race the Sun, from Flippfly, is an endless runner embodied by the phrase “just a bit more.” At its best, Race the Sun is a thrilling high-velocity struggle that pits the player against the looming inevitability of nightfall. Frustrations endemic to the endless runner genre are still at play in Race the Sun, unfortunately. A play experience that stagnates quickly, a notable lack of compelling powerups and progression, and an aesthetic that is at times dauntingly bland detract from the final experience. If you’re looking for a pick up and play game, Race the Sun fits the bill, though there might be better options out there.

Race the Sun, from developer Flippfly, is a game that constantly made me say to myself, “Just a bit more” in a number of different contexts—some good, some bad—that I will detail in this review. Race the Sun is a game that I picked up for free with my PlayStation Plus subscription. As I am always in need of a nice pick up and play game, Race the Sun looked to fit the bill perfectly. The game released originally to some pretty positive reviews, and with a solid recommendation from someone whose opinion I trust. So I snagged my digital copy, downloaded onto my VITA and got it going.

Race the Sun is an endless runner with a couple unique twists. You play as a solar powered craft chasing the setting sun in an effort to go as far as you can before your solar batteries drain and your craft eventually stops and explodes. This fits the basic ‘endless runner’ premise: each time you boot up a new run you are sent towards an unreachable goal, as every run ends in failure. The point is to go as far as you can, and collect as high as a score you can, before your session expires. The endless runner genre has seen some extraordinary success in the mobile gaming sphere, with titles like Temple Run and Jetpack Joyride. And it makes sense. Endless runners are perfect pick up and play games, as no one attempt takes more than a couple of minutes to complete. But back to Race the Sun, specifically. You must navigate through a gray and polygonal world in Race the Sun as you chasing the rapidly descending light. Along the way there are a number of obstacles you must dodge, score boosting ‘Tris’ nodes to collect, and various boosts and powerups. The player moves from region to region, avoiding certain death by collision, collecting the score multiplying Tris, and hitting boost points to propel you closer to the sun, briefly delaying the inevitable nightfall.

The sun sets fast, so you have to keep your speed up!

Similar to the other endless runners I mentioned, Race the Sun is about gradually getting further and further the more you play. This comes as a result of two things. First: understanding the obstacles you must dodge. Finding the right path through the dense and treacherous regions in Race the Sun the sun takes finesse—one that you will gain after your first couple sessions with the game. The second is the gradual unlocks and progression the game has to offer. Each time you boot up the game Race the Sun gives you a set of three tasks to accomplish. These range from simple tasks like “collect 15 Tris”, to harder ones like “clear 2 perfect regions,” to some crazy ones like “move only left through 3 regions in a row.” Fulfilling these requests with level up the player and reward them with unlocks. Unlocks usually take the form of small powerups: like a magnet that allows you to collect Tris from further away, or a higher storage capacity for jumps. Therefore the more you play, the more you unlock, the better your futuristic solar craft gets, the further you can go. Rinse and repeat. Race the Sun nails this initial sense of progression and feels at home among the best endless runners. The genre, however, is not without its ingrained faults, many of which are still problematic here. But I’ll get into that in a bit.

When thinking about Race the Sun within the context of the endless runner, I come to the first instance of “just a bit more.” And it’s a good one! In a number of different ways, Race the Sun takes the endless runner genre and adds just a bit more game-y-ness to it. Race the Sun acknowledges that a lot of other endless runners are pretty barebones, and works to make that not that case here. You have a lot more to do in your standard Race the Sun run than you would in most endless runners. A session involves managing a number of factors: dodging a wide variety of obstacles, maintaining a high enough speed so that the sun doesn’t set, avoiding the shadows cast by obstacles (since staying in the dark too long will sap all energy from your craft), and looking for a wide variety of powerup items. Before you even enter your run, Race the Sun tasks the player with gauging their play style and balancing the usefulness of the ship modifications you unlock. For example, is having the storage for two jump powerups more useful than a battery on your vehicle that can work for longer without daylight? A lot of small decisions are at play both before, and during, your run. Race the Sun also concretely rewards the player for more play and better skill, giving them access to better ability unlocks that come at a pace determined by the combination of the two.

Dodge, jump, collect Tris, manage powerups and more. There's a lot to
think about each Race the Sun run.

Race the Sun feels like a serious game too, which is accomplished by a lot of smart aesthetic choices made by the team at Flippfly. Your solar-powered craft feels fast, giving a great sense of speed, and tension when you approach the deadly obstacles, that feels lacking in other endless runners. This is hard to put into words, but Race the Sun just feel a bit more fleshed out than its peers. Race the Sun also features daily procedural generation of regions so that every day you play you have a new environment to explore. I appreciated the effort here to keep the experience varied, though “just a bit more” applies in a bad way here, too. There simply aren’t enough blocks in the Race the Sun seed library to make a region noticeably different. Though it technically changes the region layout, it always feels very much the same due same kinds of geography and obstacles you will see. I would have liked to see a lot more variety with this randomization, especially if the goal of its implementation was to keep each new day with Race the Sun fresh.

When looking at the total package Race the Sun provides, I liked that there was “just a bit more” things you could do within the game itself. Race the Sun features a notable amount of content for the player to explore. Design elements are incorporated that are sure to appeal to the more devoted gaming enthusiasts that pick up the title. Outside of the standard ‘race the sun’ mode, Flippfly included a special ‘Apocalypse’ mode to the game. Within this bonus mode, players are tasked to take on crazy and brutally challenging regions as a test of your highest skills. I’m a pretty competent endless runner guy, but man that mode is tough. And I liked that! Apocalypse added a great way to freshen up the experience. Further, Race the Sun gives the player a number of ways to dive deeper into their experience. One way, that I have already covered briefly, are the ship modifications. But there are many others. Regions will sometimes have hidden warp gates that allow exploration of an aesthetically distinct and interesting bonus zone. Exploring a region can also reveal portals that teleport you to the end of your current region, providing interesting risk-reward decisions. Warp to avoid a particularly tough area to make sure you survive? Even if that means giving up a lot of the score boosting Tris? I really enjoyed these choices, and wish there were more of them in-game.

I loved the hidden bonus zone, but I just wish more areas had a different
aesthetic like this one. Race the Sun can be oppressively grey.

Unfortunately, not all my “just a bit more” thoughts for Race the Sun are positive. In so many different ways, I wish Race the Sun did just a bit more to deal with stagnation of the play experience. This is the ingrained endless runner fault I mentioned earlier: historically, the genre does a horrible job at maintaining player engagement over long periods. This is sadly true for Race the Sun as well. I found myself only able to play Race the Sun for 15-20 minutes at a time before I got bored with it and had to put the game down. The powerups I mentioned previously help, but they come slowly and really only marginally affect the play experience. The gray sameness of each region reinforces the feeling of repetition while playing, which acts synergistically with other elements to sap enjoyment fast. Compelling in-game challenges for leveling up & unlocks would have been one way to spice up each new session, but that is not the case here. Level-up challenges are pretty basic, boring tasks. Like I wrote earlier, they are things like ‘Do X jumps’ or ‘Collect X’ Tris. The only interesting challenges, like ‘Only move left through 2 regions’ are often too difficult to pull off. Some sort of middle ground would have been great: interesting tasks that aren’t too hard to accomplish. For example, geography specific tasks would have been perfect, like “Crash into the windmill obstacle” or “Race through 2 tunnels in one run”. Or something. Anything would have been more interesting. Finally, “just a bit more” content, maps, and substantive powerups could have gone a long way to removing the often frustrating repetition of Race the Sun.

 

Race the Sun gets a lot right, but falls victim to many of the genre's endemic faults.

“Just a bit more” polishing of the final product would have been great, too. I enjoyed the minimalistic aesthetic in some ways, but it wears on the player the more time you spend with the game. The grey, overly simplistic textures and the one song present in-game compound the blandness that sets in while playing. A poorly optimized game engine adds a little frustration to the mix, too. Load times while getting into the game are long on the PSVITA. From boot-up to play takes far too long, and detracts from the pick up and play experience you would want from Race the Sun. Once everything is loaded, there is minimal load time between deaths & restarts, which is great. I just wish some of that initial time could have been cut down.

Race the Sun is like all score chaser games, where I constantly had the feeling that “just a bit more” could lead to my new high score. I enjoyed my time with the game. Race the Sun is a fun, competent take on the endless runner genre that infuses some more serious game design elements to the mix, but falls victims to many of the genre’s faults as well. Race the Sun is good at what it tries to be, but doesn’t offer much else. If you find yourself in the market for a VITA endless runner, Race the Sun is a good choice. It just unfortunately doesn’t do enough new or fresh to recommend highly.

Race the Sun

3/5