I was going to give this a try until I read the comment from "Lord Blackblood" on Steam. In particular. "You get 97 achievements for just turning on the game for the first time and 3 for actually playing it." The rest of the comment almost convinced me to avoid this, but meaningless achievements is a clear sign that a game has nothing else to offer and the developer gave up early or intended only a quick cash grab. I like the "minimal" graphics style and the game looks promising, but I'll pass until they use this to create a real game with assignable keys and controller support. Thanks GOTD and WhiteRabbit for your comments as well! (rant may be justified, but as I recall those 100-level games usually sold for 30-40 USD, which would be over 100 USD today! So .79 for 20 good levels would not be so bad)

Question: why is there not a simple plugiin for every platform that manages controllers and keys? If every developer paid $5 to license it for each game, there would be a large sum available to fund it. How hard is it to detect a keypress or controller push, then map it to what a given program wants? Why do very few games support joysticks for flying/driving, they should be handled the same way. Why does everyone make this so difficult? Did Microsoft and Apple make this impossible? My rant is done ;-)

How do you control it?

Running Man 3D

In Brief

A minimalist 3D platformer

Developers Introduction:

I'm glad to see you in the first part of Running Man 3D. The goal is very simple, you need to collect all the balls to reach the finish line, overcoming various obstacles. Levels of varying difficulty, from very easy to the most difficult. You can choose from 3 camera views, a first-person view, a third-person view and a side view......Good luck.

Reference accessed HERE. 15th October 2019

The Game:

Running Man is a 3D platformer with minimalist graphics. The aim is to collect all of the balls and make it to the finish post without falling off the platforms and avoiding any obstacles.. I'd class this as a semi hard core platformer, but only because once you get past level 3, you need to time your jumps perfectly and be precise in where you jump from, otherwise you'll either not make the jump, miss the ball that needs to be collected, therefore have to back track or overshoot and fall. If you fall at any time, you only have to restart from the beginning of that level. There are three camera views which you can change using the 'C' key i.e. a first-person view, a third-person view and a side view, you can toggle through them at any time. I spent about 10 minutes in the third person view repeatedly falling short of the first moving platform in level 4 after sailing through the first three levels in just over a minute. I then checked the controls and realised I'd neglected to use the 'speed up' key (Shift). You can see all the key bindings for this game in the image second image at the top of this short review. Apart from the first few levels, it is quite a challenging game (especially for what some people term in the UK cack-handed); however this may have been because I'm left handed and found the unlock-able key bindings adversely affected my game play; for example, trying to press the W (move forward), Shift (Speed Up) and Space Bar (Jump) with my right hand while I controlled the direction of movement via the mouse with my left hand was pretty difficult and was not very conducive to comfortable game play nor accuracy when it came time to jump as I was concentrating more on where my fingers needed to be rather than looking at the screen. Added to that, there are only 8 levels to this game (though there is a part 2, but that is a separate game). Seriously, what is it with these indie developers these days (am I getting too old and just being grumpy, or looking through rose coloured spectacles from my youth). When I first got into computer based games over 30 years ago, these types of games used to come with at least 50 to 100 levels and often included a level editor, so you got real value for money. At least today's game is free for us and okay, it's only £0.79p so could we ask for more anyway. Personally I just think selling such short games feels more like a rip off, but so long as platforms like Steam are willing to take developers money for including their games, they are happy as they win from both the developers and consumers (rant over).

You can read mostly positive reviews from the Steam community HERE. Steam sell this for £0.79/$0.99. There's even a part 2 for a further £0.79/$0.99 HERE. You can see a few videos of game play , and via the Steam store page .

Conclusion:

Overall, this is worth downloading especially if you are into 3D platformers and marble rolling games. Why the latter you may ask; well, It sort of reminded me of those marble rolling games, but using a running man in place of the marble. I'd score this a 7 out of 10 minus 1 for only having 8 levels. This is more like a demo IMO. I think the developer should combine parts 1 and 2 and include a level editor so that the community could boost the number of levels available. Don't get me wrong, the game is actually quite good, just too short and no ability to edit the key bindings makes it difficult to play especially for left-handers like me.

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