#aerial_kinghts never yield

[syrupspinner]

i just completed Aerial_Knight's Never Yield 

can you believe some places dont include the apostrophe in the title? like it's not proclaiming who spearheaded Never Yield, its a statement

my only experience with runners, as a genre, is through bit.trip. I beat the first game and played a bit of the second. this game, which I'm gonna call AKNY for short, is honestly a pretty good second example.

the controls make a lot more sense that bit.trip. I remember complaining that duck was down but kick was Y so I had to switch to keyboard or something. in akny, you've got the colour-coded cardinal directions, which applies to both the dpad and face buttons: up is high jump (obstacles you need to high jump are always red), left is midjump (yellow), down is duck (purple), and right is sprint (blue). straightforward, easy to nail in a split second, this is good. it's a little silly that you have two jump buttons, because yes there are obstacles colour-coordinated to mid that you can clear high, but it's still pretty elegant with how simple it is to grasp

the plot is... uh, minimalist. there's no dialog, so here's what I've got. you've got the main character, who i just kinda called Runner in my head. he escapes from a tube in a lab and spends the rest of the game dodging the authorities about it. there's also another guy, implied to also be from the same tube situation, who I called Swords cuz he's always got some swords floating around him. Swords is king of the streets or something, he's the strongest guy around, and Runners out to take him out and claim the crown. that might be wrong, especially since it seems like the sequel is more fleshed-out, but the story isn't all that important anyway. watch the cool guy do something cool and then play a level about it

I really dig the style. if anything's gonna sell you on the game, it's the vibes. the music is ultimately a bit simple, but they're all really solid hiphop instrumentals. the design is... it'd call it comic-like, but it's more like a graphic novel almost. it's not vibrant but it's still colourful, y'know? oh, speaking of style, I love the level where you're running up a building and you've got this really funky camera angle, added such a cool visual flair. 

that's kinda it! the game is pretty short, I beat the campaign in like 2 hours I think, and a lot of that is from killing myself when I missed that stupid coin in the school level. y'know when people call a fighting game character honest? that's what this game feels like to me. it's as stylistic and badass as the budget let's it, and I respect the hell out of it. totally worth playing.

and then there's endless mode.

I understand this was added in an update. you run laps around a gym dodging randomly spawning obstacles. youve gotta play for, according to my research, 30 minutes straight of this for all the achievements. woof. so... I just kinda got to it. it took me three days, across... I'd guess three or four hours of attempts. I put kitboga on my other monitor and reached the world's stupidest zen state, just reacting to the obstacles. if you wanna keep track of your progress without pausing all the time, I'm pretty sure it took me about 165 laps. thats a bit egregious. there's already an achievement for 30 laps, which I think works great as a threshold of basic capability. like, if you can do 30, you can do it forever, kinda like how crypt of the necrodancer only asks you to get a 10 run win streak before saying "okay it wasn't luck you can do this forever if you wanted to"

not enough to ruin the game by any means, especially since it's optional. this game has a great soul and fun gameplay to back it up, absolutely worth trying out! just a heads up, don't expect triple-a polish, keep your expectations realistic for an under-the-radar indie.