The Spray Paint? I’m Just Holding It For A Friend…
Drop your spray-can, pull your pants up over your cheeks, and burn some rubber! If you’ve ever wanted an excuse to run from the cops but never actually had the courage to commit a crime, Subway Surfers will get you moving… or, at least one of your fingers. What? There’s muscles in there.
Sporting a large cast of graffiti-obsessed and seemingly inexhaustible young hoodlums, Subway Surfers pits you and your hover board against a fat cop and his chihuahua in – what you can only hope might be – the longest run of your late-childhood. Using nothing but the pad of your index finger, you’ll haul ass through the subways of New York with the po-po in tow while dodging oncoming trains, leaping over barriers, and jumping face-first into bazillions of floating gold coins. Subway Surfers is essentially a three-lane rehash of Sonic The Hedgehog’s early childhood criminal career, long before his intense cross-fit training gave him the power of supersonic speed.
Surfing On Ribbons Of Gold
The game mechanics are fairly straightforward – swipe left and right to strafe, swipe up to jump, down to roll, and for the grand finale ultra-combo move of badassery… strafe in mid-air. Ooh! Pwned. You’ll be swiping to-and-fro with increasing intensity as the trains start to pick up speed and the obstacles get grouped closer and closer together. While on your mad-dash of perpetual forwarditude, you’ll be following a trail of coins and attempting to intercept the occasional power-up; magnets will automatically draw all the coins around you directly to your pockets, jet packs launch you into the tree-line for a less stressful moment of coinage, and bouncy sneakers greatly increase your… bounciness.
A Repeat-Performance
Unfortunately, it seems that your hasty escape will always… always… be surrounded by the same scenery. In my time play testing Subway Surfers, I found my self craving different environments. Don’t get me wrong – the graphics are crisp and vivid, and the game stuttered not once on my Nexus 7 – but I quickly grew weary of running along the same tracks. What’s even more frustrating is that, despite being such a simplistic pick-up game, it takes an ungodly amount of repeated runs to amass enough gold to buy new characters and hover boards. I’m not even entirely sure that saving all those coins will net you much other than points for style. The second character I earned, a girl named Tricky, didn’t seem any more adept than my starting boy at running the gauntlet.
Run, get coins, get power-ups, avoid big things that smash-face, and don’t let Officer Joe catch you. As with most mobile games these days, you can connect to Facebook and gloat, buy in-game rewards with real ca$h-money, complete various “missions” (roll 30 times, spend 2k gold, tag-up your grandma’s trailer), and purchase power-ups with your hard earned coin to make your next go-round a little easier.
The Verdict
Subway Surfers is a very simple and straightforward game that performs wonderfully and has some very nice graphics. Unfortunately, I got bored after the twentieth run-through and decided to go vandalize my neighbor’s house instead… Despite its nearly fanatical fan-base and having won an Editor’s Choice award in the Google Play store, there just isn’t enough variety or depth in this game to keep me interested.
