Review: Line Rider - Freestyle

Forget about your car games. If ever there was a DS title designed to get James ‘Top Gear’ May into playing games, this is the one.

Most of you will be fully aware of the fact that Line Rider started off life as a PC browser game thingy. It had a community and everything. For those of you who don’t know, Line Rider is all about getting a suicidally enthusiastic sledge rider from the top of a slope to the bottom. The creative bit was managing velocity and guiding your rider through loops, jumps and suchlike that you created. The community then shared courses on teh Internets and everything was wonderful. Now a commercial release of the game has appeared on the DS, PC and Wii and the usual hippy-like suspects are muttering darkly about commercialisation, fighting The Man and all that, while the developer is able to eat food, sleep on a bed and otherwise reap the benefits of their abilities.

Expanded

The DS version of Line Rider – Freestyle is a puzzle game, as well as holding on to the simple joys and community shenanigans of the original. There’s a story, though it’s a basic affair charting the rivalry between the hero, the clearly brain-damaged Bosh, who wears white and his black-clad rival. There’s a girl in there also. She’s blonde. The story was meant to frame the single player game, but it really doesn’t succeed. The ho-hum, not really funny, sub-Looney Tunes, Crunchy-O-Vision video clips do nothing to endear you to the characters. This is a shame, because the puzzle-oriented single player stuff is otherwise pretty damn fine.

Simply put, there’s a start point and an end point to each puzzle. Between one and the other there are five red coins/tokens you have to collect and a bunch of gold coins you can choose to collect to unlock bonuses (extra riders and stuff). The course has various holes in it that you fill with one of three line types – a basic line, and ones that speed up or slow down your rider. It’s so simple and beautiful a concept that the fiddly controls feel more of a problem than they actually are. It’s not helped by the tutorial that, ultimately, is as much use as a text message saying “Oh, yeah – you can draw lines an’ stuff. On you go!” In a stroke, they miss out such delights as the fact that drawing a basic line left to right delivers a different result from drawing the same line right to left. Later on, purple lines appear on the course with no warning, and these disappear the first time you run over them. There’s no explanation as to why you can’t draw these yourself in single player. You just can’t.

Fiddly Precision

You have two basic modes in which to draw your lines – freehand and straight. Both can be tweaked after they are drawn in a pernickety process that can be hit or miss. Sometimes a straight line will let you change it, sometimes it stubbornly won’t. Sometimes, despite having drawn a freehand line in one sweep, the game decides it was actually several lines. Often you just have to rub out and start again. The need for all this tweaking comes from the fact that the brilliant physics of the rider mean that he reacts to every tiny, imperceptible bump on the track. If he fails in his run because of such a thing, it’s oddly both frustrating and comforting to know it’s your fault. Also, the game is solid enough that you will (mostly) happily rush back to smooth out a curve simply from the joy of seeing your rider make a successful run.

It’s that need for absolute, complete, fussy precision that would draw the likes of James ‘Captain Slow’ May to this game. However, you need to be that kind of obsessive physics-based puzzle solver to get pleasure out of the single-player game – to get past the fact that the learning curve is north-face of the Eiger steep and the fact that the first puzzle to solve is how the controls work. I’ve heard that, later in the game, you have to deal with two riders at the same time. I don’t know, because I only got to 50% of the way through before I hit two puzzles that utterly stumped me. For now, at least – I will prevail.

Puzzling Decisions

One other thing that niggles about the single player game – you can’t save your levels. This is a massive pain. First of all, it gives you no bragging rights. When you work your way to the end of the puzzle, mangling your brain in the process, it would be fantastic to be able to save your solution, because it really can be your solution as some of the later puzzles offer that kind of flexibility of detail. Also, you can accidentally finish a level without picking up all the gold coins. At this point, you lose all your work, meaning that to fine tune your track to get that last coin, you have to start again. Lastly, it takes so long to fine tune some of the tracks (some took me over an hour, but that’s because I really do like smoothing curves to unnecessary precision) that it would be nice to be able to save mid-way through and come back to it.

Save Me!

The lack of a save function is particularly baffling when you consider that the other two modes, freestyle and puzzle creation, allow you to do just that. These two modes are the heart of the community side of Line Rider and, it has to be said, they are clearly where the real effort has gone. In freestyle, there are twelve types of line to draw, scenery can be laid down, parallax scrolling taken advantage of, the rider gets to pull off tricks, the camera can zoom in and out, and everything can be tweaked and adjusted to suit your vision. In puzzle creation mode, you can be every bit as devious, if not more so, than the creators of the single player game.

Once you’ve created your ideal celebrations of manipulated gravity, sharing them is pretty straight forward, as is downloading the efforts of others. Considering Nintendo’s ham-fisted approach to online stuff so far, they could do with chatting to the folks at inXile. It’s all very simple.

Lack of Appeal

Line Rider – Freestyle is not going to appeal to everyone. It’s a tough puzzle game made unnecessarily tougher by slightly random, very (perhaps necessarily) fiddly controls. However, it’s also a game that rewards persistence, even if it mysteriously fails to reward achievements. Had it got the controls utterly bang on, Line Rider would still have a limited appeal simply because of the nature of the puzzles, and the fact that not every gamer wants to get creative with the huge array of tools on offer.

Of course, that’s a shame. Line Rider is immense simple/complex (simplex? Comple?) fun if you’re the right kind of person, if you’re the target audience. If you’re not, you’ll be baffled as to what all the fuss is about, while the rest of us will justifiably mock you for the knuckle-trails you leave behind you as you walk.