Make Your Run For Distinctive's Dead Runner, Now Available In The App Store
August 25, 2010
Distinctive Developments' Dead Runner has arrived in the App Store, giving distance game fans an eerie and invigorating experience that differs from the normally bright and more arcade-like games that currently dominate the genre.
Dead Runner is an endless distance game that places you in a horror movie environment. The game's perspective is first-person, which provides a more immersible effect than third-person or side-scrolling. While basic black and white concepts have been done before, Dead Runner has you sprinting amongst trees and other obstacles in a beautifully 3D rendered foggy and haunted forest.
The object of the game is to stay alive by running away from an unknown evil that is after you. You can't hide, you can't climb, you can only run as fast and as far as possible. Your character runs automatically, leaving you to control the darting between obstacles via the tilting of your iDevice.
The typical distance mode pushes you to run indefinitely until you make that unfortunate wrong step and collide with a gravestone or tree, thereby allowing the mysterious evil to overtake you and end the game. The Points mode grants points to your distance, but points can be increased with multipliers and other bonuses achieved by running through floating, glowing, colored orbs. An orb's attribute replaces the previous, so it will be important to remember what color adds what.
Distinctive's decision to include OpenFeint integration, that I find is a nice replay value perk, furnishes players with the chance to earn achievement awards and work their way to the tippy-top of the global leaderboards.
Why choose Dead Runner over similar titles? Dead Runner retains the same addictiveness as the traditional endless distance games like Canabalt, but brings, what I would describe as, an updated and more life-like feel to it.
Dead Runner is designed for iPhone and iPod touch running iOS 3.0 or later, and is now available in the App Store for $.99. If you happen to own an iPhone 4, you'll get an even better experience with Retina level quality graphics and gyroscope control ability.
