At it’s best this was a very fun little game that could pump you full of adrenaline when you were lucky enough to compete against willing competitors with more skill than you that would bring out the best effort in yourself. It’s time to get to that fatal flaw though, that was unfortunately never fixed by the developer despite this game having been able to just barely squeak out an existence for well over a decade thanks to the good luck of Apple never completely killing off Game Center. That fatal flaw that was never addressed is the fact that players that felt like they were going to loose a game could simply run away from there opponents, which would cause the game to end in a draw, which is what happens when a certain amount of time goes by without a kill if you didn’t do the smart thing and just quit instead of letting the runner opponent waste your time. Because of the way the game is designed not only are players uncatchable in most of the maps, if you choose to try to chase an opponent that’s refusing to play and simply running away from you instead, it gives the running player major advantages in winning a game I won’t waste time getting into here. Because of this major game design flaw, Running away from players actually became the playing strategy of a good handful of players, this undoubtably caused many players to simply walk away from this game. It’s at this time I’ll mention that not all maps have this running flaw, some maps in the game are circular with little or nothing to hide behind, when I get matched up against a player that runs in one of these circular maps most of them immediately quit because they know they can’t run away from me and wait for me to quit or time to run out to draw. That’s the point I wanted to get to here, it’s completely understandable that it would’ve never occurred to the developer that a good handful of players would waste there time running away from an opponent, and it would be enjoyable enough for them to waste someone else’s time, or make them wisely quit and allow them to technically win by forfeit. But since this was very much in fact the case, I must point out it is astonishing that the developer simply allowed these players to ruin his good little game when it could’ve easily been fixed with small adjustments that probably would’ve took less than a day of work. Here are just a couple easy solutions to this problem to prove my point although I could list more. 1. The game has these wind coins that help players by refilling a tank of air that is used to propel your plane forward, when a player collects one of these wind coins, it disappears for a certain amount of time, therefore when it comes to running players, you can’t catch them because they’re able to collect these wind coins that the chasing plane cannot. In this example, all the developer would have had to do is change a piece of code to make it so the wind coin never disappears so that the chasing plane could collect it as well, then when it comes to runners it could’ve been a fun race to hunt them down, in this scenario players would just stop running because it just wouldn’t work to avoid losing. 2. There is a map in the game called Deathmatch which is just a small little room intended for quick games with intense action and no where to hide. Instead of the game ending in draw when an opponent runs away, with just a little bit of coding work, the developer could’ve made it so that players are transferred to this death match room instead to finish the game, these are two of the easiest ways to solve this problem that I can think of, I could think of dozens more that would take more code and more characters to describe here than the App Store allows. But I think I made my point, it’s so easily didn’t have to be this way, I contacted the developer about this, and he was kind enough to respond back, the reason he gave me for not doing anything about this problem was essentially it was just too late, and the player base is now too low, despite the fact that the developer seems to be a kind hearted guy, with good intentions I can’t give this game anymore than two stars, the only people it’s worth trying to enjoy it with now is your own family around holidays. The game could have been so much more than it was had the developer put in that little bit of extra effort that would have been worth all the rest while he still had the chance or the will to do so. I respect the fact that he’s now retired that I hope he enjoys, but I needed to point out one of this games biggest shortcomings because of how disappointing it is knowing how easily it could have been avoided.Update: I gotta give the developer a little credit that he’s still trying to keep this game alive, even though I’m sure there’s no real money being made on this game, so he’s basically working for free. The Everything unlocked free on Friday was a nice try, but unless Apple can get Game Centre working properly again it’s looking like the end for this game, I’ll try to get friends and family to give it a shot while it’s still somewhat working.
