Ah, the endless runner genre. Where would mobile gaming be without it?
Skyline Skaters isn’t hugely original, but it is fun. Tactile Entertainment’s game asks you to choose a skater from a group of 4 - each of whom have their own special abilities - and then pick a skateboard (again, each of which has its own abilities), before throwing you into a side-scrolling series of endless rooftops. Your task is simply to survive for as long as you can whilst evading capture by the police, while collecting coins along the way. Those coins can then be spent on upgrading the various power-ups which spawn in each run, or on upgrading your skateboard.
Controls couldn’t be simpler - a single tap anywhere on the screen will make your character jump; tap again, and they’ll perform a double-jump. And you’ll be jumping a lot - most of the coins are in mid-air, you’ll need to hop from one rooftop to another, while obstacles such as rockets need to be leaped over.
Collectable letters litter each randomly-generated level. Collect these and spell out a word, and you’ll trigger a temporary super-skate mode, which sees you launched into the sky temporarily. Once airborne, you can hoover up a large number of coins before coming back down to terra firma. You’ll also collect power-ups - one doubles your score, while another will see you hurtling forward through the level. There’s also a force-field which protects you from harm - useful because - in classic genre style - the farther you get in each run, the harder it becomes - with more and more obstacles being thrown your way.
A cartoon visual style keeps things pleasing on the eye, though don’t expect a huge amount of variety - while a real-time day and night cycle is a nice touch, you’ll still be staring at the same set of rooftops over and over again. As addictive as the game is, after a while you’ll wish that the developers had included other levels to keep things fresh. With a little luck, the developers will release an update with new content.
Despite this, you’ll keep going back for more. You always feel as though you’re making progress towards something in the game - you’ll finish each run with either a new challenge completed, the ability to upgrade your skateboard, or power-ups. Many endless runners fall down by failing to provide a satisfactory sense of progression, but in Skyline Skaters if you can’t upgrade something, you always feel as though it’s just one more run until you can.
The sound is something of a mixed bag. The music becomes repetitive fairly quickly, and the sound effects are minimal. That said, they’re at least done well; production values for the game are consistently high throughout every aspect of it.
Despite being free to play, you never really feel as though the game is forcing you to spend real money. While two of the skaters are locked behind incredibly high coin values, they’re still obtainable with enough time and perseverance. A couple of the skateboards are locked behind real-money paywalls, but with so many alternative boards to choose from for free - all of which can be upgraded multiple times - there’s plenty to do here without ever feeling the need to spend a single penny.
If we’d change anything else about the game, it would be the inability to manually perform tricks. While the controls are easy to get to grips with, a game about skateboarding should allow you to pull off ollies, kick-flips and everything else. The skaters do perform tricks, but they’re entirely automated. As grievances go it’s a minor one, but something that would be nice to see introduced in a sequel.
Skyline Skaters is a fun game. It’s not particularly original, and belongs to a genre that is already rather crowded, but a well-judged system of progression and plenty of unlockables means that you’ll keep tapping away long after you promised yourself that you’d put it down to do something else.
Dale Morgan
@spamdangled
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