Space isn’t a friendly place, and if my years spent consuming sci-fi media has taught me anything then it’s fair to say the chances of you encountering an evil chest bursting Xenomorph is 99.99% assured. Infinity Runner lacks such a creature, but it makes up for this deficit with its own collection of strange denizens and futuristic quirks, like how you spend the entire game naked.

The game is best described as an endless runner akin to popular mobile titles like Temple Run, only with a storyline that’s broken down into several levels. You assume command of an amnesiac unfortunate enough to be at the epicentre of a calamity on a ship where everything is blowing up. A disembodied voice informs you that there’s no time to talk and that you must run for your life. Just when you think things couldn’t get any worse, shortly after escaping you also find out that you’re a werewolf. Yup.

Gameplay consists of an on-the-rails sprint through the bowels of the ship, with you taking control of our naked protagonist’s positioning. As you progress you’ll have to manoeuvre around the oncoming hazards by dodging or jumping over them, and any contact with a danger zone will cause you to fail and kick you back to your last checkpoint. You’re given a set number of lives to use up on each level, and once they’re all gone you have to start from the very beginning of the mission. The checkpoint system alleviates a lot of the stress that comes from an accidental death, and for the most part there are sufficient lives given to get through a level without having to restart much.

That is until you approach the final level, which has you engage in combat with an unsavoury individual. The game handles combat with a series of quick time events which aren’t too intense and can be completed fairly easily. The last fight, however, consists of a string of these sequences one after another. With such a small time frame to hit each key, there’s a good chance you’ll fail. The big issue with this segment is that once you’ve played through your extra lives, the game takes you back to the very beginning of the level, requiring you to sprint through a number of hazards to get back to the boss fight. It was infuriating, even on a normal difficulty level which rendered the rest of the game at a reasonable difficulty.

As a werewolf, you’re undoubtedly going to want to make use of your inhuman speed and strength, and the game is happy to oblige. There are sections dotted around some of the levels which will transform you into your wolf form, making you run much faster along the rails of the level. Whilst this may seem like a good thing, it soon became clear that speeding up your movement in a game that requires you to spot incoming dangers and react to them isn’t necessarily a positive. Hurtling towards a sharp turn already requires a good amount of focus and fast fingers when running in your human form, so when you’re supercharged things become more difficult. The very option of becoming this powerful beast becomes more of a burden than a gift, and as a result it feels like this power up flies in the face of what it was supposed to be.

What’s more, being a werewolf also changes the way the camera moves as you start to run on all fours. Naturally the camera follows the movement of a bounding were-man and bobs up and down to compliment the movement. It’s a nice touch, but the bounding feels excessive, sometimes to the point where you lose vision of any incoming hazards mid bounce. Again this becomes more of a hindrance to the player rather than a boost, making the werewolf form more of a curse than a blessing.

Infinity Runner does a great job in maintaining its momentum as the game progresses, feeding you new hazards regularly to keep you on your toes when you least expect them. There are enough explosions, neon strip lights, and sleek chrome surfaces present to make the futuristic space ship feel authentic despite never hanging around long enough to look at the finer details. The story of werewolves in space is weird enough to work well in the setting. Despite the heavily flawed werewolf controls, the game remains intense enough to keep you engaged throughout the story. However, people with slower reactions or a low tolerance to failure should tread carefully as there’s enough room for error to cause fits of rage worthy of a werewolf.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

For those unfamiliar with the subgenre, endless runners (also called auto runners) typically start off with the main character running/flying/racing across a 2D scene. The player has no control over the ability to stop or slow down. Instead, the main objective is stay alive by dodging obstacles and projectiles. In the case of Jones On Fire, our hero Jones is a firefighter outrunning a raging fire. Trip over a fallen tree or land in a burning patch, and an onrushing wall of fire begins its pursuit. Avoid making another mistake for a brief time and the inferno goes away, restoring the chaos to its normal levels. The player is initially capable of jumping over objects on the ground and doing a running slide under obstacles perched just above. There’s a side objective of collecting kittens that are scattered throughout the levels and can be redeemed in the in-game store, but more on that later.

There are some key design choices where Jones On Fire is able to separate itself from other comparable games. For one, it’s not a true endless runner in the traditional sense. Instead of one long run, the action is broken up into separate runs, giving the player a much-needed respite. Each run ups the difficulty or “hazard level” by mixing in jumps and slides more frequently, but offsets the risk by rewarding higher score multipliers for collected kittens. Another big difference is instead of a sudden-death scenario, the player can actually take more than one hit before dying.

As mentioned before, players rescue kittens in both standard and golden varieties. In between rounds, these can be redeemed for a wide variety of helpful items broken down into a few categories. The “Abilities” open up new actions for the player to perform during their runs. “Pickups” introduce a permanent change to the game like random medkit drops that restore health. “Super Boosters” are one-time-use items like a dose of catnip to automatically attract kittens during the next run. We’ve seen pretty much the same system with Jetpack Joyride where there’s a side goal of collecting coins to buy powerups. Here, however, each item also has multiple, purchasable ranks that increase the potency of the upgrade, but also exponentially increase in price. As with Jetpack, there are also bonus goals that reward the player with extra currency for achieving certain milestones.

Mew’ll love those adorable kittens.

If there’s one thing that Jones On Fire really has going for it, it’s the “cute factor”. The developers really pushed the saving kitties theme, and it’s difficult for even the toughest man-dude to not get drawn in by the mewing kittens as they are collected and create a trail behind Jones. Although the game is played in 2D, most of the characters and objects have a charming, voxel appearance which helps distinguish the game from its more spritely-looking counterparts. The music manages to be both whimsical and intense, but fits the feel of the game perfectly. My biggest complaint with those presentation elements is in the lack of variety. I made it to Level 7, but the music only changed once and the background remained the same the entire time. Not that players will really have time to sit back and enjoy the scenery, but it can make repeated playthroughs a bit of a stagnant experience after awhile.

The gut reaction to seeing a game like Jones On Fire is to outright dismiss it or chastise it for being a clone. That would be shortsighted. It certainly borrows too many design cues from market leaders for it be an original experience, and that factors heavily into the overall review score below. The elements it does take, though, are some of my favorites in those other games. The unique tweaks that Glass Bottom Games has made turn Jones On Fire into even more of a family-friendly title that’s likely to appeal to a wide audience that isn’t yet burnt out on the endless runner subgenre. It’s a clone, to be sure, but in my eyes it’s still an entertaining one. And because it’s free, I’d definitely recommend everyone at least try it out.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

Although this review covered the iOS version, the developers are also working on an Android port. This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.