Developer: Flippfly LLC
Steam Release: Dec 2013
Hours Played: 3.3
Similar To: Breakneck / Infinity Escape / Infinity Racer
Rating: 5/5 Parsnips
Race The Sun is a super-slick endless runner where you control a small jet-plane that travels just a few feet above the ground at super-fast speeds. As per usual a third-person camera view follows behind you on your way. Swoosh past huge geometric buildings set in a totally flat, expansive terrain and hurtle continuously past structures that skim past your earholes within inches of your life. The idea of course is to dodge and weave to avoid hitting the obstacles and to pick up crystals or shards to improve the multiplier and gain abilities. All the while, you are trying to beat yours and others' online score. The main difference between this and other forward-moving runners is that absence of boundaries to your left and right.
Along the way, you'll have the opportunity to leap and drift into the air either by using the ramps littered around the landscape or using the collectable green shards that gives you the ability to jump. Other shards include the blue ones that increase your multiplier and the yellow ones that give you solar energy i.e. more time by raising the sun in the distance. The sun is essentially a timer that gradually lowers itself and ends your game if it sinks entirely below the horizon. Spending too much time in the darkness or shade also eats away at your solar energy. The difficulty is nicely pitched yet one collision equals instant death and you will frequently curse yourself when you crash into that block yet again. Thankfully, restarts are instant and load-screen free so you can jump back in the saddle instantly - which you'll probably want to do quite often.
To be honest, the menus seem a bit too "mobile friendly" for a PC game and don't really blend in too well with the main game. You'll also need to scroll down a few notches, every single time, to find your high-score when you visit the Leaderboard. Graphics in the main game itself are all kept extremely basic and simple: the landscape is smooth and flat; obstacles are of geometric shapes including blocks, cubes, pyramids, rocks and balls and the whole lighting effect is filtered through a pale wash so the draw distances are kept short. Hence, the game runs with zero stutter. You also get an energetic Arabic-style soundtrack to zoom along to (but only the one tune it seems).
This is not a runner a la Boson-X or TEC 3001 where you can hop in and out of different levels. This is a true endless runner where you're thrown onto the course and challenged to get as far as you can with no choice to do a different stage. Granted, the track is in the form of a "daily" challenge but the task is the same: record a score, get placed on the leaderboard and attempt to improve it to rise up the online ranks. Not happy with your score? Try again tomorrow for it all gets reset the next day. This is not a criticism as perfecting that best run over 24 hours works absolutely fine. Still, you also have opportunities to "level-up" your ship to a maximum of 25 by fulfilling certain conditions. Reaching a 15 multiplier, colliding with 8 objects, doing 20 barrel rolls in one run or being in the air for a set total are all little missions you can try to boost that level.
CONCLUSIONRace The Sun is the ideal runner to come home to after you've been stuck in traffic for half the day. There really is nothing more to think about beyond swerving around those obstacles, sweeping through a few twinkling shards and just going really, really fast; until, that is, you smash head-first into that freakin' windmill for the 13th time. (Ok, so maybe not the best antidote to traffic-jam stress!) But regardless, the game really is geared towards getting you flying that jet and not having your attention wondering anywhere else. Definitely a great choice for speed-freaks who just want a short 10-minute session of gaming to kick back with at the end of the day to unwind.
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