Ride The Waves Forever With Infinite Surf
Infinite Surf ($0.99) by nocanwin is an endless distance game that will have you surfing the longest wave of your life. Grab your board and head for the beach to catch a ride and stay on as long as you can.
This game uses traditional endless distance gameplay. Players travel along, picking up sunbeams and power ups. Using tilt controls, veer your surfboard to the left or right. Instead of falling off a walkway or getting hit by boulders, you lose the game if you miss three sunbeams.
There are three power ups that help increase the number of coins you collect in a game. The “Power Turn” slows the action down for a few seconds while a bunch of bubbles pop up on the screen. The bubbles have numbers in them. Tap on the bubbles to gain a point score associated with the bubble that you touched. The “Free Surf” power up is the same as a magnet. It will draw the sunbeams close and make it easier to grab them. The “Barrel” will turn your, normally calm, wave into a barrel roll, giving you twice the point score, but making the path more difficult to follow.
As you collect sunbeams, you can use them to buy new surfboards and locations, or upgrade the power ups. Upgrades only last during the game you are playing. Once you lose a game, you lose the upgrades. When you buy a new board or location, it will remain unlocked forever.
There are so many things wrong with this game that it is hard to find a starting point. There are no instructions. You don’t know if the game is based on a virtual controller, a swipe gesture, or tilt controls until you figure it out for yourself. You don’t know that upgrades only last for one game until you’ve already wasted 600 sunbeams on them. I never did figure out how you earn sunbeams, either. When you collect them during gameplay, they are only represented as points. After your game is over, the summary page shows how many sunbeams you’ve collected, but there is no explanation as to how the number was generated.
The game is fairly boring. The waves aren’t particularly difficult to surf and it never gets harder. The only time the action increases is when you grab a Barrel power up and suddenly have more to do.
The game runs smooth, but it just isn’t very good. If it were free, I’d say take it for a ride. At $0.99, I don’t think it is worth the money. If the developers included an info page to explain some of the features, it might help. However, the fact that it never gets harder, no matter how long you surf, makes it forgettable. If you are looking for a good endless distance game, I suggest looking elsewhere.
