Race The Sun Review

Take the intensity of F-Zero, add a dash of Starfox, sprinkle some Wipeout over the top and you have Race The Sun.

The first time I played Race The Sun, I was relatively unfazed by it. I died pretty quickly and started again. The second time, I got a little further. Skip forward ten minutes (and about twenty lives later) and I was completely hooked!

The objective of the game (as some of the more switched on readers among you might have already sussed) is to Race The Sun. Yup, you guessed it! You are in control of a solar-powered craft set amongst procedurally generated surroundings and obstacles. Pick up speed boosts, point multipliers and various other items whilst hurtling towards the relentlessly setting sun at break-neck speeds. If your wing scrapes an object then you lose all of your momentum and that elusive sun starts to set at an alarming speed. Crash head on and it’s back to the start you go. As if that wasn’t enough to get the heart rate going, there are also various challenges for you to complete whilst you’re playing. These challenges get progressively harder the more you complete, so no matter how good you become at Race The Sun, it’s still, well, challenging!

As well as the game itself, the devs over at Flippfly have seen fit to include a level editor so that anybody can try their hand at creating their very own world in which to Race The Sun. A lot of gamers love to create their own worlds in a sandbox environment (you only have to look at how successful Minecraft has become) but are often put off by the complexities and frustrations than can occur with in-game level editors. What Flippfly have done is made their level editor incredibly simple, intuitive and just plain fun! I can honestly say that once you’ve completed all the challenges on the single-player game, you’ll have hours of entertainment making your own worlds, playing them and sharing them with the community.

As a PC purist, I loathe using a gamepad on any PC game and (unless forced at gunpoint) I will opt for a keyboard and mouse every time. That said, another inclusion in Race The Sun is the compatibility of Brass Monkey, an app that you can download for your iOS or Android device. Load the app and your smartphone is transformed into a wireless controller which you can now use to play the game, and it works brilliantly! If I was enjoying the game whilst using my keyboard, I was in another timezone stacked with fun once I started using my iPhone as a gamepad! I should probably add that Race The Sun does also support normal gamepads but if you choose this option instead of Brass Monkey then I’m afraid that you, my friend, just aren’t geeky enough.

There’s great news for some of you console gamers out there too as Flippfly recently announced that Race The Sun will be coming to the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PS Vita this summer. As well as some exclusive bonus content, you will be able to purchase the game via cross-buy which means you only need to purchase one copy of the game in order to play it across all three devices. That is testament to the great work that they’re doing over at Flippfly as the devs have also confirmed that there will be no hidden purchases or microtransactions.

Flippfly was started back in April 2012 by brothers Forest and Aaron San Felippo and you really can tell that they have poured not just their effort but their hearts into Race The Sun. It’s the little things such as the humorous quotes on the loading screens that really give it that personal touch that you seldom get with games these days.

This quaint indie game goes a long way to proving that a game doesn’t have to centre itself around stunning graphics, intricate storylines or likeable characters in order to establish itself amongst some of the truly great indie titles out there today.