If you are a creator of any kind out there, whether it be for games, music, or whatever, growing pains are to be expected down the road for you. These can come in many forms, such as you not being able to come up with something truly great to rock the industry that you are working in, not being able to reach a wide enough audience when it comes to actually selling or promoting the thing that you make, or, in the most common of occurrences, the things that you will make are generally not very good at all. One example I find myself stumbling upon time and time again would be Squaresoft, who even before the days of Final Fantasy, had some trouble exactly finding proper momentum when it came to not just the type of games they made, but also their quality, with some games like Rad Racer being pretty good on their own, but then you have games like King’s Knight, which are so bad and outdated, you wonder how they were even made in the first place. But then, you have those games from them that are just… aggressively stuck in the middle in terms of quality, with there being no better example of this other than The 3-D Battles of Worldrunner.
Like with all of Square’s early titles, I hadn’t played this one before deciding to out of curiosity, but I didn’t have too many high expectations going into it. I had seen this game in action once before, and based on what I saw, I figured it was just a clone of Space Harrier with not much else to show for itself, but at the time, I figured there was something… more to it. So, after yet another embarrassingly long time in-between discovery and gametime, I decided to check it out for myself to see how it is, and now that I have fully beaten it, I can say that it was… ok. It is fun to play for a good while, and this spin on the type of gameplay Space Harrier provided is an effective one, but the cracks start to show soon enough, and you are left begging for it to be over by the point you finish the game.
The story is very simple, where in Solar System #517, the many planets of the solar system are being overrun and taken over by the evil Grax and his race of aliens known as Serpentbeasts, so it is up to a space cowboy by the name of Jack the Worldrunner to step up to the plate and take them all down, which is a fine enough premise on its own, because when you are playing the game for yourself, the story is gonna be the last thing on your mind. The graphics are good, having plenty of simple yet pleasing visuals for the levels and for Jack himself, even if the levels themselves can pretty repetitive by the fact that you will be staring at the floor most of the time, the music has caught a bad case of Simpson Syndrome, where there is only one or two tracks playing throughout the entire game, and while they are good tracks, you will definitely get sick of listening to them after a while, and the gameplay/control is pretty simplistic, and it can be fun to get a handle of at most points in the game, but again, as you keep going, the flaws do start to rear their ugly heads eventually.
The game is a 3D rail shooter platformer, where you take control of Jack the Worldrunner, go through a set of eight worlds, each containing their own set of interconnected levels, run and jump your way through plenty of obstacles while either avoiding or defeating the many enemies that you will come across on your journey, gather plenty of powerups by smacking face-first into the many pillars around you, with the powerups being able to do things such as giving you more hit points, temporary invincibility, and the ability to fire at normal opponents, and take on plenty of bosses in free-flying sections, with the bosses themselves being…….. sigh, well, I’ll get to them in a bit. What we have here is a pretty solid foundation for a game here, one that works well enough on its own to entertain those curious enough to try it out, and one that does put an interesting and fun spin on other similar games like it.
As I have brought up plenty of times in this review already, the game, on its surface level, could be written off as nothing more than a Space Harrier clone and nothing more, but when you actually play it for yourself, you realize that there is a lot more going on here. While that game had its priorities firmly set in you flying around and shooting everything that came your way, Worldrunner changes this up by making it so that, for 90% of the game, you are locked to the ground, with you needing to jump around in order to survive the obstacles that you will be facing. Naturally, like any game with platforming elements, one of the biggest aspects of this platforming gimmick is that you need to exercise proper timing and precision, making sure that you jump from one platform to the next while going at the proper speed, aiming for whatever you could use as a landing point, and since you are constantly moving forward at all times, along with there being a time limit, this makes it so that the game provides a pretty fun and challenging set of obstacles to overcome that fill the player with satisfaction once they manage to make plenty of tight jumps, just barely scraping by death with the skin of your teeth.
This, however, all somewhat gets ruined once you reach the last three worlds of the game, where everything starts to fall apart. Once you reach the sixth world, they start incorporating gimmicks that make the entire game a sequence of trial and error, such as with the first level of the sixth world requiring you to hop on top of these pillars in order to cross large gaps, as well as the worlds following that making it so that you are constantly moving at high speeds while jumping and dodging plenty of things. I will admit, some of these changes and gimmicks are clever enough, using what little the game has to challenge the player in new ways, but with some of the gimmicks like the previously mentioned bouncing on pillars, it goes overboard with the difficulty, especially when you are, again, constantly moving at all times.
And then we get to the bosses of the game, which are easily the worst part of the whole journey. All of them behave in the exact same way, with them being long serpent beings that will move from the background to the foreground, and you have to shoot down their bodies as well as the head to properly kill them. This is a fine mechanic and all, but it is repeated for every single boss in the game, and by the time you reach the final boss, you get really sick of constantly having to do the same thing over and over again for the sake of getting a move on. This aspect of the game gets even worse when you have multiple boss fights that require you to take down the enemy MULTIPLE TIMES in order to properly beat it. Nothing about the boss changes whatsoever when it respawns, and it is just meant for you to kill it again in order to pad out the game’s playtime, which not only makes these bosses monotonous, but also extremely frustrating when you die to the 5th copy of one boss, and have to fight all copies over again.
Overall, despite having a fun twist on the 3D rail shooter type of gameplay, the game is ultimately brought down by its insanely specific gimmicks seen in later levels that require perfection above all else, repetitive bosses that take way too long to take down, and its general unforgiving nature that makes it so that I can’t really say it is worth playing all the way through whatsoever. I would recommend it only to try out, not to necessarily try to play all the way through, and I would also recommend it for those who were big fans of similar games like Space Harrier, because while this isn’t too different from something like that, it does things differently enough to where you can have a good time with it and appreciate what it does for the genre……. before falling apart in the latter half. Also, like with Rad Racer, this game also has that stupid-ass 3D mode that Square just loved putting in their games for some reason. I mean, at least it makes more sense here, given the fact that the game is literally called 3D Worldrunner, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Game #592
Like with all of Square’s early titles, I hadn’t played this one before deciding to out of curiosity, but I didn’t have too many high expectations going into it. I had seen this game in action once before, and based on what I saw, I figured it was just a clone of Space Harrier with not much else to show for itself, but at the time, I figured there was something… more to it. So, after yet another embarrassingly long time in-between discovery and gametime, I decided to check it out for myself to see how it is, and now that I have fully beaten it, I can say that it was… ok. It is fun to play for a good while, and this spin on the type of gameplay Space Harrier provided is an effective one, but the cracks start to show soon enough, and you are left begging for it to be over by the point you finish the game.
The story is very simple, where in Solar System #517, the many planets of the solar system are being overrun and taken over by the evil Grax and his race of aliens known as Serpentbeasts, so it is up to a space cowboy by the name of Jack the Worldrunner to step up to the plate and take them all down, which is a fine enough premise on its own, because when you are playing the game for yourself, the story is gonna be the last thing on your mind. The graphics are good, having plenty of simple yet pleasing visuals for the levels and for Jack himself, even if the levels themselves can pretty repetitive by the fact that you will be staring at the floor most of the time, the music has caught a bad case of Simpson Syndrome, where there is only one or two tracks playing throughout the entire game, and while they are good tracks, you will definitely get sick of listening to them after a while, and the gameplay/control is pretty simplistic, and it can be fun to get a handle of at most points in the game, but again, as you keep going, the flaws do start to rear their ugly heads eventually.
The game is a 3D rail shooter platformer, where you take control of Jack the Worldrunner, go through a set of eight worlds, each containing their own set of interconnected levels, run and jump your way through plenty of obstacles while either avoiding or defeating the many enemies that you will come across on your journey, gather plenty of powerups by smacking face-first into the many pillars around you, with the powerups being able to do things such as giving you more hit points, temporary invincibility, and the ability to fire at normal opponents, and take on plenty of bosses in free-flying sections, with the bosses themselves being…….. sigh, well, I’ll get to them in a bit. What we have here is a pretty solid foundation for a game here, one that works well enough on its own to entertain those curious enough to try it out, and one that does put an interesting and fun spin on other similar games like it.
As I have brought up plenty of times in this review already, the game, on its surface level, could be written off as nothing more than a Space Harrier clone and nothing more, but when you actually play it for yourself, you realize that there is a lot more going on here. While that game had its priorities firmly set in you flying around and shooting everything that came your way, Worldrunner changes this up by making it so that, for 90% of the game, you are locked to the ground, with you needing to jump around in order to survive the obstacles that you will be facing. Naturally, like any game with platforming elements, one of the biggest aspects of this platforming gimmick is that you need to exercise proper timing and precision, making sure that you jump from one platform to the next while going at the proper speed, aiming for whatever you could use as a landing point, and since you are constantly moving forward at all times, along with there being a time limit, this makes it so that the game provides a pretty fun and challenging set of obstacles to overcome that fill the player with satisfaction once they manage to make plenty of tight jumps, just barely scraping by death with the skin of your teeth.
This, however, all somewhat gets ruined once you reach the last three worlds of the game, where everything starts to fall apart. Once you reach the sixth world, they start incorporating gimmicks that make the entire game a sequence of trial and error, such as with the first level of the sixth world requiring you to hop on top of these pillars in order to cross large gaps, as well as the worlds following that making it so that you are constantly moving at high speeds while jumping and dodging plenty of things. I will admit, some of these changes and gimmicks are clever enough, using what little the game has to challenge the player in new ways, but with some of the gimmicks like the previously mentioned bouncing on pillars, it goes overboard with the difficulty, especially when you are, again, constantly moving at all times.
And then we get to the bosses of the game, which are easily the worst part of the whole journey. All of them behave in the exact same way, with them being long serpent beings that will move from the background to the foreground, and you have to shoot down their bodies as well as the head to properly kill them. This is a fine mechanic and all, but it is repeated for every single boss in the game, and by the time you reach the final boss, you get really sick of constantly having to do the same thing over and over again for the sake of getting a move on. This aspect of the game gets even worse when you have multiple boss fights that require you to take down the enemy MULTIPLE TIMES in order to properly beat it. Nothing about the boss changes whatsoever when it respawns, and it is just meant for you to kill it again in order to pad out the game’s playtime, which not only makes these bosses monotonous, but also extremely frustrating when you die to the 5th copy of one boss, and have to fight all copies over again.
Overall, despite having a fun twist on the 3D rail shooter type of gameplay, the game is ultimately brought down by its insanely specific gimmicks seen in later levels that require perfection above all else, repetitive bosses that take way too long to take down, and its general unforgiving nature that makes it so that I can’t really say it is worth playing all the way through whatsoever. I would recommend it only to try out, not to necessarily try to play all the way through, and I would also recommend it for those who were big fans of similar games like Space Harrier, because while this isn’t too different from something like that, it does things differently enough to where you can have a good time with it and appreciate what it does for the genre……. before falling apart in the latter half. Also, like with Rad Racer, this game also has that stupid-ass 3D mode that Square just loved putting in their games for some reason. I mean, at least it makes more sense here, given the fact that the game is literally called 3D Worldrunner, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Game #592