In speed we trust: ‘Bust-n-Rush’ review

No affiliations with Busta Rhymes, Bust-A-Move, Bust-A-Groove, or busting a nut.

An old friend of mine recently pointed me in the direction of the freshman project for software developer Techtonic Games. The game, entitled BUST-N-RUSH, is a new indie action/puzzle game built with Unity. In the hours I’ve spent with it, I’ve come to a series of conclusions that I hope will help potential buyers make a decision, and maybe lead to some tweaks from the developers (should they stumble onto this blog).

Bust-n-Rush is a game that, at first glance, looks like GEARS OF WAR collided with BIT.TRIP RUNNER. The former, because the man you control (named “Kovo”) looks like a generic big-grunty-guy like in GoW, and we see him from “over-the-shoulder” the whole time. The latter, because the game involves running and dodging obstacles. But that’s just the surface.

Kovo has a sweet multiplier going right now. He's also (likely) moving too fast for a still screen to provide any context.

As it turns out, the key gameplay mechanic to this run-n-break game is something that makes it entirely different from BTR: acceleration. The basics go like this:

1) Blue stuff breaks, but only if you’re going fast enough (and not decelerating).
2) Red stuff never breaks. Don’t touch red stuff.
3) Going faster is always easy. Slowing down can only be done sparingly. You will move forward.
4) As the game progresses, things get exponentially more complicated: 3 lanes, power-ups, moving obstacles, etc.

In the first of the game’s two key modes, the “Challenge Mode” (essentially the campaign mode that has a definitive endpoint), there are a total of 30 challenges. I gave up at about 18. Normally I just do not give up on games, but this one had a difficulty curve that went so steep in the second of the three worlds (each world = 10 levels), My brain started to hurt as I played. High-velocity madness can do that to you.

You can enter different worlds and individual levels within them without clearing the one directly previous, but that didn’t seem to help me much. I was able to clear the first few levels in World 3 (a beautiful outer-space world), but it gets so much harder, it seems to me this game is made for gamers who thought SUPER MEAT BOY was a cakewalk.

Kovo in spaaaace! (But, in this screen, he's indoors. The outdoor segments are the best part.)

It doesn’t help that, even when setting the graphic levels lower to improve framerate, the framerate at higher velocities does slow down to about 20fps. Worse yet is the eternal problem of putting 3 “lanes” into these kinds of games: I’ll hit the button once to move over one lane and the game interprets it as “move twice!” Perhaps it would’ve been better to limit the game to two lanes.

Once you’ve had all you can stand in the insanely hard challenge mode, the “Endless Mode” world is the place to casually beat the crap out of every blue-colored object in the universe. I found myself drawn to this area over and above the challenge mode because I felt like I was actually improving there, and the set goal markers for high scores (part of the game’s many achievements) gave me something attainable to work through.

So there you have it. A fun running game where braking is just as important as speeding, and paying attention to what’s off in the distance is the key to victory. It sells for $8 on Gamersgate (toss in an extra dollar for the 20 minute soundtrack: c’mon, support the musicians!). This is a budding studio that I personally think could do a lot of great things in the future. For now, my only recommendations would be to improve framerate and input control (the 3-lane problem, again, is huge), and maybe come up with a game title that doesn’t make me think of the national-greatness propaganda NES classic RUSH’N ATTACK.

I loved this game as a child; but in retrospect, running into things at an extreme speed to break them is more fun than frantically tapping "A" to knife communists at close range.

Played: 10 hours
Platform(s): PC/Mac
Price: $7.99