The fastest way to get yourself a Wikipedia entry is to come up with your own urban sport. Take Free Running, it was 'invented' in the mid-1980s when a group of French guys gave jumping off walls and balancing on railings a fancy name: Parkour. Add to this some cod philosophy about becoming 'one with your environment' and you have a first class ticket to immortality.
Not that we want to denigrate what free runners do – it can actually be frighteningly spectacular – but in Glasgow, where I live, we were playing chicken with busses a long time before Sebastian Foucan, David Belle and Cyril Raffaelli climbed up their first traffic bollard.
So, yes, I'm a little bitter about the French always doing things with more panache. But that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the fact Sebastian Foucan, one of the originators of the sport, is your amiable, heavy accented mentor and talks you through all the basic moves to help you navigate urban environments with style and speed and 'flow'.
Along with simple jumps, vaults and grabs, there are a number of advanced moves to help you conquer levels. These include wall runs, horizontal tic-tacs (leaping between walls Mario-style), sling shots and a pharaoh climb (making like an Egyptian to work your way up narrow passages). Add to these floor tricks, such as star jumps and butterfly kicks, and you have a recipe for a very contemporary platform title.
If all this sounds a bit like a
Tony Hawk game but without the skateboard, you'd be right, except this doesn't offer that series' depth, fluidity and variety. The main problem with
Free Running is that it simply lacks the flow it so desperately wants to capture. Some sticky controls and plodding animation see your free runner tumbling into railings and over the side of buildings far too often.
Practice does improve things, of course, and it is possible to extract some entertainment from elegantly linking moves together but many of the game's challenges require both a saint's patience and a village idiot's persistence.
Run through coloured markers, perform tricks, hit a checkpoint before your competitor – at times you feel like a pet being trained to run through an animal assault course. What makes a great platformer so enjoyable is not just a gradual mastery over the environment but a final reward for all the effort. Yet
Free Running has no plot, no character, no carrot, not even a trophy cabinet. But then free runners probably cock a snoop at such material rewards.
This game is also unremittingly soulless – ironic considering it's based on a sport purportedly reaching towards some cosmic connection with the environment. The cityscapes are grey, colourless and angular, containing the kind of architecture we can only describe as 'university science block'. Add unimaginative mission goals and you have a game which often singularly fails to inspire.
On a more positive note,
Free Running can provide the odd moment of exhilaration if you're willing to put up with the trial and error. Though ostensibly open to exploration, most levels have a small number of buildings and obstacles and can generally be tricked fluidly in a predefined manner. Find the moves to fit each level and you begin to get a kick out of the game.
From this you realise
Free Running lacks the organic nature of other extreme sports games like the aforementioned
Tony Hawk but once you familiarise yourself with each level's 'personality', then the fumbling and tripping stops and the fun begins. There are also some amusing side-missions such as Crash Test, which sees you flinging Max Dash (a crash test dummy) around to score as many damage points as possible. Exploding crates and banana peel add to the amusement.
Ultimately, though,
Free Running is an interesting shell of a platform game that lacks excitement, inspiration and a simple motivating reason for playing through to the end – unlocking more levels and clothing items just isn't worth the effort. With larger environments and more spectacular feats, this could have been special but, if you'll allow the term, it's a bit pedestrian.
No, when it comes to new urban sports some are best left on the streets. Though a game about dodging busses? Now
that could be interesting...
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