Hell Rider
|
| Hell Rider

The life of a motorbike stunt driver must be an exciting one, filled with shattered limbs, concussions, large buses, and a never-ending procession of rings of fire, each one bringing you closer and closer to that one leap that's just too far.

Or, if Hell Rider is to be believed, it's an incredibly dull, lacklustre existence alleviated only by its brevity. Rarely, if ever, has a game so ineffectually captured the spectacle and awe of its chosen subject.

Hell Rider is about as thrilling as putting the kettle on, albeit without the danger of electrocution.

Stunted

The game is controlled with a single button - either '5' or the joystick, depending on your preference. You push it to build up speed, which is indicated by a star-spangled energy bar at the top-right of the screen. Then you let go, and your daredevil trundles off to leap over one of the three obstacles the game has to offer.

You'll either be leaping through flaming or non-flaming rings or jumping over one to four buses. And that's it. There are so few levels that you'll have polished off all the content before any adrenaline has the chance to escape into your blood stream.

In a way, though, the lack of content is a mercy, because the levels on show here are so painfully boring that any more of them would probably bring about catastrophic narcolepsy. You can finish the game without even looking at the screen.

Spine shattered

The idea that you'd ever want to come back and try any of the challenges again is frankly ludicrous, but the game gives out bonuses for completing a task on your first attempt in a playthrough, so anyone masochistic enough to want the high score is going to have to.

Hell Rider is a terrible example of how to translate an exciting sport onto a mobile phone. Boiling the experience down to a single button-press sucks out most of the fun, and the boring graphics and poorly designed challenges see to the rest.

There's no escalation, no challenge, and really no reason to play this utter dud of a game.

Hell Rider

A dull waste of a game, Hell Rider is about as extreme as walking up the stairs
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.