Game Reviews

Off The Leash

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| Off The Leash
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Off The Leash
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| Off The Leash

Turns out the new chief of police isn’t much of a dog person, and so he wants them all hunted down.

So begins Big Pixel Studios’s take on the endless-running genre, starring a fearless canine marauder on the lamb from the long dog-net of the law.

Viewed from above, Off The Leash sends you slaloming up-screen and cross-country in a bid to beat the clock and burst through checkpoints before the cops have time to set up game-ending blockades.

Each successive time limit is more brutal than the last, and your route to freedom is littered with an increasingly elaborate arrangement of garden ornaments and police munitions. It’s not easy being a dog.

Pedigree chums To make things easier, you can scoff food scraps to level-up and increase your speed. Assuming you don’t slam into something and skid to a time-scuppering halt. There’s help at hand from canine compadres, too - liberate fellow dogs and they’ll fan out behind you, snaffling up morsels in their path.

Occasional power-ups offer momentary respite from the constant threat of capture - including speed-boosting chilli snacks, doggy-doubling pick-ups, and - most precious of all - golden whistles to summon the blockade-busting Big Dog once per run.

It’s all perfectly pitched twitch-based action (assuming you can hack the tilt-only controls), with those strict time limits making Off The Leash hard put down as you inch further into the game and up the leaderboards. It’s also helped enormously by a Jetpack Joyride-style mini-objective structure which gives a bit more purpose to your cross-country escapades. How much is that doggy in the window?

Elsewhere, Off The Leash sports an extensive range of character customisation options, ranging from new pooches with tweaked abilities to purely cosmetic canine accessories - all of which you can buy with coins collected during your high speed getaways. Be warned, though - prices are steep and all but the most patient will likely need to splurge some real-world money to get that pirate hat of their dreams.

Novelty items aside, Off The Leash is free. And it's decent, if not revolutionary. It borrows the best bits from recent iOS endless-runners and dresses them up in colourful and chunky graphics, making for solid entry in a cramped genre.

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Off The Leash

A solidly constructed, surprisingly addictive take on the endless-running genre. With dogs
Score
Matt Wales
Matt Wales
Following a lifetime of adventure on the high seas, swabbing the editorial decks of the good ship IGN and singing freelance shanties across far-flung corners of the gaming press, Matt hung up his pirate hat and turned his surf-seared gaze toward the murky mysteries of the handheld gaming world. He lives to sound the siren on the best mobile games out there, and he can't wait to get kraken.