Game Reviews

Food Run HD

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iOS
| Food Run HD
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Food Run HD
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iOS
| Food Run HD

Food Run HD is an easy game to like. It has colourful cartoony graphics, simple controls, a pleasantly upbeat muzak score, and it's all about tasty snack food: Simpsons-style pink-iced doughnuts, stripey bags of popcorn, wedges of orange and cake, strawberries, hot dogs, watermelons, peanuts, and other assorted treats.

Moreover, and with neat thematic consistency, it's likeable in exactly the same way that a tasty snack is. It's pretty, easily accessible, and pleasing to the senses it's designed to appeal to. However, it also has the same limitations as a snack does, in that it's rather basic and it won't sustain you for very long.

The aim in this endless runner-cum-cartoon platformer is simply to reach the end of each stage intact. Your sprite - initially an egg, but you can swap in any of the other snack foods you collect along the way - runs automatically, and your only method of control is to tap the screen to jump.

At first the game keeps things simple. You have to leap over a few chasms and avoid the odd patrolling woodlouse or set of chattering teeth, but it's never difficult to reach the end of a stage.

Whenever you fail you have to start at the beginning, but none of the early stages is long or difficult enough to make this a particularly galling prospect. Naturally, there are stars - and snacks - for perfectionists to collect.

Mobile phone confection

It takes a little while for Food Run HD to get interesting. As you make your way through the game you'll start to encounter larger and more diverse levels, containing poles that you automatically climb up or down depending on their colour, conveyor belts that wrong-foot you by slowing you down or speeding you up, semi-concealed caves and alternative routes, spring-boxes, and even a cleverly designed stage that you need to backtrack through to collect every coin.

The snacks that you collect follow you in a line, like ducklings, and leading them to safety adds an extra dimension of difficulty to the later stages.

But this comes close to exaggerating Food Run HD's depth. Levels are short, and every successful run is achieved through a combination of fast reflexes and memory. As you make your way into the later stages all that happens is you find yourself relying on memory more and reflexes less, because the cost of poor reflexes - having to repeat a few seconds of gameplay - is too trivial to care about avoiding.

At the same time, on those occasions when you've memorised a section and the only impediment to success is your own inability to get past a particular obstacle, having to repeatedly replay the entire level up to that point quickly becomes infuriating. Thankfully, it's rare to become stuck for very long.

Endless-yumming

Food Run HD is both a victim and a beneficiary of its own simplicity. The simple act of barrelling along and tumbling and jumping when the need arises is enjoyable thanks to responsive controls and likeable, cartoony presentation, but the playing mechanics are so stripped back and prescriptive that the game only really works when the activity is rudimentary.

Many of the near-misses and balletic moments - when you jump to collect an arc of stars just as a sawblade rolls along the ground, or fall from a platform and coincidentally land on patrolling woodlouse - are so choreographed as to be like clockwork, and too often when game attempts to be more interesting it's skewered by sudden difficulty spikes that you have to remember your way out of.

Thankfully, these spikes are pretty rare, and for the most part Food Run HD stays within the narrow boundaries it creates for itself. That is, it's a cheerful, charming, pretty, and well-constructed endless-runner that's not quite like any of the other endless-runners on the App Store. It's no banquet, nor even a square meal, but as snacks go it's very palatable indeed.

Food Run HD

Food Run isn't perfect, but it's an unusual and likeable endless-runner all the same
Score
Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.