Brave Guy Running Review by: zanderlex - 4.8/10
Go Run AwayThis is the worst good game that I have ever played. First off, when I saw this game in the app store I thought to myself that it was going to be like any of the other endless runner games such as Temple Run and Angry Gran Run based on the title of the game. I like those kinds of games so I decided that I was going to give it a try and as it turns our, this is nowhere near the same as the standard endless runner games. The game is kind of like Minion Rush in terms of what you have to do because instead of being given one changing map and then running in it over and over, you are given a bunch of levels and you stop running either after you die or once you complete the mission for that level.
That's where all of the endless runner similarities end because there's many big changes such as the view. Most runners are 3D and have you run forward along a track. This game is way different and has you running along a 2D side scrolling platform. I'm not actually too fond of these since you can't really see too far ahead. One other difference is that there's a variety of enemies that pop up on the map randomly and will actually attack you with various attacks and yes, you can fight back with swinging and with a gun. If anything, the game play style resembles something like Jetpack Joyride and even though I was expecting a regular endless runner game, I grew to like this game except for one major letdown which will be explained later.
GRAPHICS 7/10
The graphics are pretty good, when you turn on the game and go into the main menu you see something that's like a cool cartoon or anime. The character design is pretty good and when I first played the game and looked at the runner it looked like something that I would have seen in Naruto. The game is full of color and a decent amount of detail. When you're going through each level, you don't really see much, in the first level you just have the cliffs that you run along with grass, you see colorful trees and bushes, and then you see the enemies and the background. That's really not a lot for you to see over the course of a whole level but everything that you see changes after every single level which means that by the time that you have played the entire game you would have seen so many different sceneries, most of which are pretty good looking. For the most part I would say that the graphics are on par with what you would expect from a side scrolling platform game and there isn't really anything wrong with that. Overall the game has color, it has some details, and it looks good so my grade for graphics is going to be a 7 out of 10.
SOUND 4/10
When it comes to the main aspects of the game, the sound really has to be the worst. I don't know what the developers were thinking when they tried to put in some sound into the game but it didn't seem to work, at all. I didn't even know that the game had music in it until the 3rd time I played the game and it sucked. Don't get me wrong, the song that plays when you are in the main menu is actually quite good and catchy but there were quite a few problems with it. First you can barely hear it, I had my headphones all the way at the top volume and my own music was fine but then when I turned on the game it was so quiet. It really sounded like it was less than half the volume of everything else. Then you have the quality which was just as bad and it sounded like you had broken headphones on. I could have probably taken am old voice recorder and recorded the sound coming from the TV and get the same result. You know what I mean.
You would think that from there the sounds would get better, but they don't, they really don't. The regular sounds of the game are just so lame and generic. I remember watching a few Markiplier videos on YouTube and he would joke around how some indie games instead of paying to make their own music they would use free basic sounds. This game takes that to the next level. When you fire your gun there isn't even a single sound and then when it hits someone it sounds a bit like Mario jumping, I don’t even know why you would want a sound like that to be used for shooting someone. The rest of the sounds don’t get any better really, you have the small sounds when you jump, when you collect coins, when you die, etc. The sounds that you hear throughout the game are either not good or they are done in a way that doesn’t work too well and for that the grade for this aspect is going to be a 4 out of 10.
ADDICTIVENESS 5/10
The game does have a pretty good amount of fun in it but overall it’s not something that you would want to keep playing over and over. If each level wasn’t restricted to doing one mission and you could just keep running, then it would be a lot more fun but because the game is limited in how many levels there are and what you can do in each level, there wouldn’t really be much entertainment in doing the same thing over and over, especially once you have beaten the entire game. When you start off playing the game for the first time it offers a decent amount of fun and can be quite addicting but once you reach the end, there’s no point to even keeping the game anymore, and that’s assuming that you can even make It to the end of the game. For the most part, when it comes to fun, the game is right in the middle, it’s not a lot of fun but there is a good amount of fun in there and my grade for addictiveness is going to be a 5 out of 10.
STORY 7/10
When it comes to a story, this game does have a few good points because of all of the missions that you need to complete in order to progress. Most endless runner games just have you run as far as you can while getting a huge point collection and a ton of coins to buy stuff. This isn’t really like that and is more like Minion Rush which I mentioned earlier. Throughout the game, there’s a bunch of various levels which each come with their own missions. One mission might require running until you collect a certain amount of coins, some missions might require you to survive until you have run a certain distance and then some might require you to defeat a certain amount of enemies. Since every level generates randomly doing a mission might take a while to complete. Once you beat a mission you get to unlock the next level and the loop of missions and levels keeps repeating until you beat the entire game. You’re going to end up having to use some of the coins that you collect to progress by buying all sorts of upgrades and that’s pretty much it. The game has nearly 2 dozen missions for you to complete which is quite small but make up part of a story and my grade for this aspect is going to be a 7 out of 10.
DEPTH 5/10
I wouldn’t really say that the game has a lot of depth, and that’s for a lot of reasons actually. First off you have the number of levels that you get to go through. From what I have seen the entire game only has about 22 levels for you to go through which isn’t really a lot at all and most of them can be quite short depending on the mission and how the level generates. Next up you have the nature of the levels and missions, since you’re restricted to a mission there’s no room for you to do anything else. Once you complete the mission that’s it, the level is over. That means that you can’t go for another thousand meters or try to get more coins, there’s no free running at all. Another negative aspect of depth would be the upgrades that you can buy. Most runner games I have seen let you buy upgrades to drops, boosts, characters, and all sorts of small things, but that’s not the case when it comes to this game. There’s only 4 things you can buy, and I really dislike some of the things you can buy. There’s one item you can buy for like 30,000 coins that automatically collects coins as you pass them. Why? What’s the point if you’re only going to collect like 20 to 50 coins per run and happen to be in places where you actually need to jump so you’re going to get them regardless??? One of the things you can buy is a lottery and it randomly gives you one free item or less coins than you spent on it. So basically half of them are useless.
I might be okay with some of these if there were more upgrades available that you can win or if you could get more than 30 coins per level. I actually had to do more than 20 runs of the same level just to buy one upgrade that saves you from enemy attacks ONE TIME. It’s like no thought was put into these at all, that item that costs 20 runs doesn’t even save you from falls, it only protects you from the enemies who attack you so if you activate it you get to run through one enemy without dying, but if you fall off a cliff that’s it, you’re dead. If you want to protect from death, you need to spend even more, like 30 to 40 runs worth of coins and that only revives you ONE TIME. That’s literally everything you can buy and they are either useless or too expensive to care about and it seems as no effort had been put into making the game have a lot to offer. There’s literally as close to nothing as you can get aside for a few small things so my grade for depth is going to be a 5 out of 10.
DIFFICULTY 7
The game at times can become quite difficult. You need to time double jumps just right or you might end up faceplanting into a cliff, and you need to make sure you have enough space between you and an enemy before you fire or you will die. The game has only two controls, jump and attack so it’s pretty easy to get used to the controls but nothing can get you ready for the environment at all and you will most likely die a lot. The very first level of the game requires you to get 30 coins in one run and I had to do this level at least a dozen times before I could beat it because so many different things happened. Either I would miss the edge of a cliff or I wouldn’t time a double jump correctly, or I would misfire and get attacked or be at a wrong distance from an opponent and DIE. There’s really nothing you can do but keep trying and eventually you’re going to get it, just not really on the first try unless you are terribly good at games like this which I doubt anybody can be. There is one other aspect of the game that makes it really difficult which I had mentioned once before but I’m going to save that for just a bit later. Overall in terms of difficulty, the game can be hard and as for a grade I’m going to give it a 7.
THE NEGATIVES
There is one thing that I hate about this game more than anything else, even more than the sound and that makes the game really impossible to beat and that’s the fact that there are no save states in this game. If you leave the app and then open it up again, everything is gone and you have to start the entire game over from the very beginning and that’s a real pain. So unless you plan on doing all 22 levels in one sitting, which is doable since it’s not a lot and they are short, then you might as well just play the first couple of levels over and over again forever. That’s a huge negative since everything has to keep resetting and if there were some sort of saves, the game would have been much better but thanks to this one terrible error, you’re looking at something that’s really bad.
OVERALL 4.8/10
When you look at the game on an overall standpoint, it’s really really bad but if you just want the game to waste away some time, it’s still fun if you’re just paying attention to the game itself. Nobody’s making you listen to the music or beat the entire game so if you are only interested in running and playing, the game is really good but overall it’s not that great and has some problems, some of which can be quite big. If it hadn’t been for the problem with save states the overall grade for this game could have been a whole point hire, but as for an overall grade this game is going to get a 4.8 out of 10.
Graphics
7 Sound
4 Addictive
5 Depth
5 Story
7 Difficulty
7
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