Roger Fastman

This game fancies itself a "reverse bullet hell," which intrigued me because the fun of a bullet hell is that you are vastly outmatched by your adversaries, yet you get to overcome all odds and take down things a million times your size, so what would the reverse be?  You crushing a relatively tiny spaceship with one shot to nobody's surprise?  When the game also touts its "automatic running and automatic shooting," I'm left genuinely puzzled as to where the creators of this game expected to generate challenge.

Well, after playing the first level, I think I get it: "reverse bullet hell" is sort of a misnomer.  Sure, there are bullets flying out of you at an alarming rate, reducing almost every enemy in your path to potato salad, but such things happen in Jetpack Joyride and Super C but I'd hardly classify those as "reverse bullet hell." what this game is, really, is a freerunning game.

In the first level, I don't think anything can kill you.  All that happens if an enemy hits you or you run into a spikey wall is that your speed decreases.  And you know what?  I love that idea!  A game like this that bases itself almost completely off speed and flow needs nothing more than for a player's mistake to result in the loss of speed and flow.  The player learns their lesson, yet they don't have to perform the same sequence of tasks over and over again.  There's still challenge, but the challenge is not in whether or not you'll beat the level, it's in how quickly and with how many points you'll do it.  That structure provides a constant stream of fun and oodles of replay value.

But then...the next two levels happen.  At first, it's nothing too harmful.  There's a giant robot T-Rex following you, and if he catches up to you, you're toast.  While I wasn't a fan of this addition, I see what they were trying to do.  After all, it adds more incentive to go fast, which is what the game is all about.  But then, in the third level, there's tons of stuff that can instakill you.  Sometimes the giant robot spider following you will shoot a death beam across the top of the screen, forcing you to not jump for a few seconds, which is more of a frustration than a genuine challenge.  Most annoyingly of all, there are certain gaps in the floor that kill you if you fall into them.  I'm going at like 300mph, game! How do you expect me to predict whether or not I'll fall into a gap that's completely offscreen at the time of my jump?

Oh well.  All-in-all, the game is still very fun.  It's pleasing in every sense.  The art is original and creative, the sounds meld together beautifully, and the gameplay is real adrenaline-pumping action.  This one gets my seal of approval.  Give it a go.

Links
Gotta Go Fast: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=24650