I'm four or five levels into World 1. Enjoying it so far. The sidebar stage was really tough from the get-go. Not so sure I'll spend much time on those. Liking the 3D aesthetic more than I thought I would.

Are "sidebar" stages the ones that you unlock with gold that have the sort of like 80s retro PC look? Those are WAY harder than I expected. I gave up on the first two before even reaching the checkpoint, and on the third I reached the checkpoint without much trouble but gave up soon after that.

Played a bit into the second world and stopped there for the day. Liking it so far! Still have a few issues with it though with how the angles are a bit weird and move around a lot. It makes for some awkward precise platforming in some of the tougher sections. Also not a fan how the camera is sometimes blocked by action on the screen... not sure if that’s by design or not.

But damn are those bonus levels hard. Like Zero, I reached the checkpoint for one of them but quickly just gave up after I realized how hard the remaining section was. I’ll get back to them eventually... and hopefully beat at least one haha.

So, how is it in comparison to Runner 2? Or Bit Trip Runner, for that matter.

BTW small complaint but it's weird to me that certain things like for instance kicking signs have NO audio feedback at all. Feels like something should happen... some "breaking" noise or whatever. Were the old games like this? If so I didn't really notice it before but it stands out now.

@r_hjort It feels a lot like 2 to me so far, but with more vehicle sections and camera angle switching.

@Zero
I think the old games lacked audio feedback on those things too? I think the music had some beat or note that would coincide with you hitting the sign or whatever, but I might be wrong?

How well do those new camera angles work, btw? What little I've seen seem to make it much harder to judge distances and so on. Not sure how I feel about that.

Yeah but there doesn't even seem to be any music note or anything when kicking the things now. Honestly forget if it was always this way.

The new camera angles are... sometimes difficult. But maybe that is part of the game? It certainly adds some variety. Like sometimes it will switch behind the character and that is definitely a whole new ballpark there...

@Zero
Oh, well that's just poor layout and design then, isn't it? The lacking audio cues/feedback, I mean. The Runner games are essentially rhythm games after all. But maybe it was always like this and I'm misremembering. Might have to boot up the old games to see what they were like.

I just watched a Runner 2 video and there was definitely more of a noise when you kicked through those gates.

This is a weird omission, but I'm sure it's the kind of thing they'll patch.

Yeah the lack of noise for knocking down those things bugs me but it’s not something that really throws me off at least. Just a strange omission that feels like it could have added to the rhythm experience rather than make it immediately feel like there’s something missing.

I'm near the end of world 2 and I mean... I'd say the game is solid, but it's not quite hooking me the way 1 and (to a lesser but still high degree) 2 did.

One thing is like it either feels been there done that or the new additions are well... you have the weird camera angles, which I'm now convinced don't really add much and often take away, and you have the vehicles, which are alright but don't feel as interesting as the core runner gameplay to me. All in all it just doesn't feel as "tight" as the other 2 games? So there isn't really much new that I feel like actually adds much great to the series.

Also are there really only 3 main worlds?! I know there are the "retro" worlds but I played some of that and it's not a runner it's just kind of a sort of ok but not amazing platformer. And of course you have those super duper hard bonus stages but I probably won't even try to beat them they're just wayyyyyyyyyyy too hard.

With that said the core gameplay is still pretty solid and maybe less levels will make it easier to focus on high scores for the leaderboards (I probably won't bother worrying about the retro stage leaderboards much...)

I saw the stairs with 4 steps with obstacles on them so you can't just double-jump over the thing, at the end of the first bonus stage, and just said "fuck this" to my TV and turned off the game. That was long after the game stopped counting my attempts at beating this stage. Probably over 200.

I'll stick with the regular stages, I don't want to deal with this frustration.

Oh, so it's one of those games now. I like being challenged, but making a game difficult is not an accomplishment in of itself.

Yeah. Since this is an optional stage, I'm letting it slide, but I'm officially afraid to move on from world 1 at this point.

@Guillaume

That’s the one bonus level I beat. I’m not sure how I did it with those awful camera angles but I’m glad I did. But of course I didn’t 100% it so... yeah I’m probably never going back to it anyway.

I'm a bit confused about gem paths. The gems are just used to unlock stuff in the shop, right? Or is there something else they are for as well? If I'm going for high scores, is the gem path always going to be the best path? (I remember some inconsistency about which was the best path in Runner2.)

Ok legitimately confused how scoring works. I did 1-1, collected everything, danced probably at least 80% as much as is technically possible, hit the bullseye at the end... around 800k. Yet people have scores around 1.3M?! Where is that extra 500k coming from?! I don't think maxing out the dancing would change the score THAT much?!

Finished the game! Or at least, all of the main and retro stages except for the "super challenging" bonus stages which I'm not even going to bother with.

I still want to try to get higher up on the leaderboards, but I want to figure out how scoring works first. It's very confusing to me.

Overall though I'd have to say I'm a bit disappointed. My disappointment was a little bit abated by the fact that the "retro" stages ended up being more fun than I expected, but they're still just kind of a neat distraction (and you can get through all 3 worlds in probably less than an hour) while the main runner game has some of the issues I spoke about above... weird camera issues, not much interesting new stuff. Whereas I'd put both past RUNNER games near the top of my indie games for their respective generations, I can't say the same here.

Every once in awhile there is a moment of brilliance. There is a stage in world 3 with these big turning gears with high and low arms and the weird camera angles actually make this part pretty awesome. Overall though... it's just more RUNNER and not necessarily the best RUNNER.

Also a minor complaint is that you need to jump through a bunch of hoops to unlock all of the bonus characters. So here I am having finished most of the context in the game, with still just the two characters I started with. I'm not going to run all over collecting a bunch of nonsense to unlock them NOW. They should have just been unlockable throughout the course of natural play.

But yeah... DOES ANYONE UNDERSTAND HOW SCORING WORKS?!