REVIEW : Speed Limit (PC)
Speed Limit is a highly varied arcade-style game from Croatian coding crew Gamechunk. It’s a game that pulls heavily from various sources of inspiration. So much so that its primary theme is variety. Sure, it’s a 2D run and sniper originally but the play takes you on some unimaginable twists and turns.
Still with us? Well, let us proceed. So, yes, the play presents a 2D run and gun game set on a train. You play an unnamed hero who finds themselves travelling on a train before everything boots off and you find yourself being struck by spies and enemy fighters. The play tells you to ‘RUN!’ and so you go right and die almost instantly. You restart. You die repeatedly. Each moment you get a little further before some new warning kills you, be it a room full of characters throwing daggers or special forces types docking on the roof of the train firing at you.
It’s really shocking though just how hard it all is but thankfully the play offers lightning-quick restarts and fairly easy checkpoints for every twenty seconds of progress or so. It’s pretty frightening how natural death comes to you. Most of the time it is unlikely to prepare for. Getting shot in the legs in the dark, a knife coming from off-screen, a rail sign taking off your torso. Destruction is quick and difficult to avoid and so progress is slow. A perfect run would presumably be ten minutes but our first playthrough went way past the hour mark. Some situations usually seem desirous, impossible even but there is a plan. You just have to Groundhog Day your way through.
The game is comparatively easy to control with movement on the d-pad/left stick and then you have two operation buttons. One is your fire button, the other is a mixed-use ‘action’ switch. Thankfully you can re-bind these from the game’s pause menu, which you’ll require to do because your thumb/finger will get pretty tired. There’s no auto-fire but also there’s no limit on your ammunition, so continuous shooting is your best hope to get through the game.
After quite a few moments of battling through the train, you’ll find yourself on top of it. You’ll still be battling opponents but will now have to watch out for rail signs that you’ll either have to jump over or duck under, just like any good action film. Finally, you’ll come to a stop and you’ll jump from the train into a car. At this point, the game, rather seamlessly, switches from being a side-scrolling run and gun game to being a top-down driving game. It switches from flat at parts to vertical and has you shooting at other cars while trying not to crash your way into immediate grisly death. Again, you’ll die often.
From there the game will switch it up time and time again. From a standard 3D motorbike game (like Super Hang-On), an isometric helicopter shoot ’em up and even a sort of Afterburner jet fighter section. The continual reinvention is a success, especially if you’re familiar with the arcade inspirations that this play is drawing on.
While this makes for an exciting and pretty interesting experience, particularly if you don’t know what is occurring, there are some issues. The first one is the difficulty. This is a bold decision and isn’t in any way game-breaking but the constant deaths mean that what could have been a really good, flowing experience is somewhat hampered by the fact that you are restarting some checkpoints dozens of times. And when you do start a new section, you’ll be dead within ten seconds so you don’t get to enjoy it and take it in.
The other big problem is that not all of the segments are as good as others. While the on foot, driving and motorbike sections work well, the helicopter section is terrible to play and the jet plane part is visually unclear and so it takes a long moment to figure out what you are doing wrong. The game’s end boss is also something of a chore to get through.
So after an hour and half-ish of failure, we were left feeling satisfied that we’d knocked the game and particularly pleased to have encountered all of the varied gameplay it has to offer but we couldn’t help believing that we would rather it was more traditional in terms of its complexity. If the difficulty was toned down but you were turning back and forth between the gaming styles, this would have been more helpful. A ninety-minute game where you revisited certain modes of transportation and made more solid growth would have been amazing with this engine. But like we said, the difficulty was a bold choice and the rapid checkpointing means you can brute force your way through the game, even if we would have preferred a more skill-based approach.
The game’s stylish, neo-retro visuals are really great for the most part. As we said, seldom the gameplay isn’t always clear but for the most part, the game is full of colour and character and moves along at a great pace. The way it switches from one gameplay style to another is well represented too. We’ve often said that games are about two things: give me something interesting to do and give me something interesting to see and Speed Limit does this way more than most indie games.
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