Game Reviews

Try Harder - An endless runner with a morbid twist

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|
iOS
| Try Harder
Get
Try Harder - An endless runner with a morbid twist
|
iOS
| Try Harder

Try Harder is an endless runner with a twist. And that twist is corpses. Every time you fail your mangled body is left behind, and you can use it as a platform the next time round.

It's an interesting, if not entirely original idea, and it adds a little spice to what is, in all honesty, a pretty standard side-on auto-runner.

Try, try again

The game sees you pelting from left to right across the screen. You've got one control - tap. This lets you jump over obstacles. You can pick up power-ups as you run that change what a second tap will do.

Sometimes you can double jump, other times you can use the board on your back to glide for a short while. There's a super jump that lets you bounce along in the air for a while, and another that turns you into an almost-indestructible ball.

There are also gold-filled chests to collect along the way, but your main focus is on getting farther than you did last time. And it makes for a strangely compulsive experience.

Clambering over your own corpses to try and cross a dotted line is a compelling, if slightly grim, central idea, and you can tweet your best runs to mock your friends or annoy some spam bots.

But once you're past that you're unlikely to find much else to keep you playing Try Harder.

Scrape away its pretty thin top layer, and you're left with a standard auto-running platformer. It's solidly put together, but you've seen the mechanics at its core over and over again.

Probably stop trying

You could take its corpse trampling exterior as a metaphor for the rest. Try Harder is happy to build on top of ideas that have come before it. There's nothing wrong with that, but it means you're unlikely to become properly invested in what it has to offer.

If you're looking for an endless runner with enough of a twist to keep you entertained for a few hours, then it's worth a look. Just be prepared to get your ankles soaked in the viscera of your own rotting, expended bodies.

Try Harder - An endless runner with a morbid twist

There's a decent endless runner here, but despite its twists, it's still just an endless runner
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.