It’s hard to innovate on the endless runner if you’re sticking with just that one game mechanic. Happy Labs from Singapore proves that theory with its new, just-right endless runner, Football Rush 2014.
Created with the upcoming FIFA World Cup 2014 in mind, Football Rush 2014 is a vertically-oriented endless runner that puts you in the shoes of a young Ronaldinho-lookalike running from an angry referee. Along the way, he has to jump over or dodge obstacles like oncoming cars, traffic barricades, and stationary trucks.
(See: Puzzle Run review: so, so, so freaking cute and fun!)
Since an endless runner doesn’t have an end, your aim in this game isn’t really to escape the angry referee. Instead, your success at Football Rush 2014 is measured by the number of mangoes your little Ronaldinho picks up off the streets each time he runs. Mangoes count towards both your final score of each run, and your total virtual currency.
Currency, or mangoes, in Football Rush 2014 can be used in the game’s store, which allows you to buy upgrades for the power-ups you find while running. These power-ups give you advantages like gliding over obstacles for a short distance, bashing your way through obstacles, or picking up mangoes more easily. Unlike other running games, however, you can’t buy direct upgrades to your character.
Other additional features in Football Rush 2014 include unlockable achievements, offline play, and best of all, language localization in Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Japanese, Simplified, and Traditional Chinese. Players can also log into either Facebook or Weplay to be listed on friends-only leaderboards.
In all, Football Rush 2014 is a good-looking and well-animated 3D running game, and comes with a familiar jingling that ascends in tone with each mango you pick up. My only gripe with its audio is it could have used a more appropriate backing track; as it is, the background music the game has doesn’t quite scream “Rio!” at you.
I’ve got to give props to Happy Labs for how smoothly Football Rush 2014 plays, but otherwise, I wish they had spent a little more time on the game’s design. Football Rush 2014 looks great and plays well, but is just another running game out there on the app store, albeit one for the World Cup 2014.
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