Run In Crowd for the Blackberry Playbook

Run In Crowd for the Blackberry Playbook

Recently I was randomly clicked on the App World just to do my daily check for any updates on my apps and was surprised to see a rare free application within the Featured applications screen. I instantly decided to download it as I liked the icon for it and it had the cool feature that every time you played, you played online (unless you didn't have Wi-Fi obviously.)

I was massively surprised with how addictive this game actually turned out to be. The premise of the game is incredibly simple, you are a little square thing with legs that runs to the left and you have to jump gaps and over boxes by tapping the screen, longer taps jump further/higher and double-taps do a double jump. There are many games like this in the market and the concept is hardly original; however, what makes this game different to any other simple sideways platformer is the fact that every game you play is against other online players playing the game too. They have added in little tricks to be able to run this game how it does; one of the tricks is that they have cheekily added in the game is the simple lag of another person's game so that is appears that they have started as the same time on you on your screen. What impressed me was that there are quite a few little things that have probably gone into making this game work and yet it still runs perfectly fine with no lag or drop-outs.

The presentation of Run In Crowd is minimal due to the fact that the game has only just been released and therefore there is very little to the application except the gameplay itself and the ability to buy custom clothing for your little square with legs. The animations from these screens is very smooth and nice however which does make up for the lack of actual screens to go to. The animations are simply that it the home screen all seems to be one large page that then slides to the left and up depending on which screen you wish to go to.

The thing that people love about Indie games is that they're not trying to have beautiful graphics, they're trying to have beautiful gameplay, however saying this, Run In Crowd does accent that beauty that a lot of the best Indie games that are coming out at the moment have been pulling off. In fact, this game's presentation reminds me of Limbo which was a very popular game on XBLA and PC. It is just simple but I can see the character design becoming very iconic if the game does eventually ever hit off. I personally hope it does!

You can heavily tell that this game is an early product as there is currently no music, the “Today's best” option has a “coming soon...” message on it when you click on it and the app in general does seem a little bare. The lack of any sounds has to be the biggest drawback currently; they do ask for your opinion on whether they should add sound and music in the app's description, so maybe that's something they have thought about but want people's opinions on.

All-in-all I couldn't really review this application as it doesn't feel quite complete and I'll definitely be watching this game as it improves over the next coming months or so. I would currently have to give the application an 8.0 as it is addictive to play but apart from that and paying for new costumes there isn't really anything to do. But I will definitely bring a better review when I feel the title is a sufficient enough game to review! Until then, I'd highly suggest you download the application as it is currently free in the App World and may not stay that way for a long time if they can bring some neat improvements to it.