Gate Runner

The thrill of speed is an addiction, and it's this thrill that underpins the appeal of Gate Runner. As a game, there’s actually very little to it, but it manages to entertain nevertheless.

In terms of concept, it’s as straightforward as they come: you pass through various gates in a futuristic landscape. There’s no explanation to why you’re there, what craft you happen to be piloting, or what your destination is.

The game is divided into 15 levels, each of which can be tackled in three difficulty settings. Stages feature a line of gates that you have to fly through in order to progress to the next. Miss a single gate and it’s Game Over.

While flying through red gates has no discernible effect on your craft, others reveal special abilities. Yellow ones, for example, give you a speed boost. This has the positive effect of making your progress considerably quicker, but it also means you have less time to steer in the appropriate direction when the row of gates makes a sudden turn.

Green directional gates push you left and right, and these are usually placed next to floating obstacles. They may seem like a help initially but they can make things awkward by disorientating you: swift reactions are often called for in order to avoid missing the next gate along the track.

Movement in Gate Runner is controlled solely via a virtual joystick, which is positioned rather strangely on the right-hand side of the screen.

It's unquestionably shocking that the game doesn’t include an accelerometer option, but the virtual controls work well enough. Still, the lack of tactile feedback sometimes means your finger slips off the pad and your craft veers off course.

Aside from steering your ship you can also slow it down, although this process comes with caveats. The speed reduction gauge at the top of the display depletes every time you use this feature, and once it hits zero you have no breaking ability whatsoever.

This isn’t such an issue on the early levels, but once you get deeper into the game the gates are placed at increasingly awkward angles and hitting them all becomes a real challenge.

While the game’s stripped-down aesthetic provides an appropriate sense of speed, there are moments where you wish more effort had gone into making Gate Runner a more complete package.

The specially-composed music is nice enough, but the absence of sound effects gives the impression the game's only half-finished.

Additionally, the lack of features limits its long-term appeal. This is a title that could quite easily thrive as a high score challenge, but there’s no way of comparing your best runs with other players.

Ultimately, Gate Runner is a cut-down experience which offers short-term enjoyment but doesn’t have the refinement expected of the best games.