Hover: Revolt of Gamers Preview
The dictator of Hover City, known as The Great Admin, has basically declared martial law on all things fun and has banished all forms of entertainment. After the Admin cut all communications with the Galactic Union, a group of rebels decided that this wouldn’t fly and vowed to end the oppression on the City through the best way they knew how – graffiti and parkour.
In Hover: Revolt of Gamers, you start life as a clone for the rebellion and must make your way around the city to disrupt the dictatorship as much as possible. Even in this early access stage, there are several mission chains to complete, a load of races to compete in, and a lot of propaganda that needs defacing. As you progress through the game you’ll level up your character and augment their abilities with upgrades you get from exploring or completing missions. These include upgrades to your grinding speed, your jump height, and how fast you run. Learning to min-max your attributes will allow you to stick it to the man as proficiently as possible.
Hover is made up entirely of parkouring and racing, and as parkour is the main theme of the game, the devs have made it very fun to do so. You gain more speed through landing combos, and each part of the city was built to be run along or jumped over. There isn’t any kind of health meter, no fall damage, and you don’t attack anything, so you don’t need to worry about dying. You just run and jump and grind around the city, completing missions as you go.
Though the tutorial does a good job at explaining how to play, it makes you work for it. You need to find random people who are dotted around the city to tell you how to do the advanced stuff, instead of having a mission tutorial. Though it’s kind of contrived to do this, I did appreciate the lack of hand holding. The only trouble you’ll likely run into are the cameras that the dictator set up to make sure no one was having too much fun. If you’re caught by one of these they’ll summon a spy-bot to hunt you down and teleport you to the nearest isolation booth where you’ll be given a criminal record. These records but can be easily removed but I’m still not sure what the negative effects of having one is.
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“You’re able to wall bounce from side-to-side to reach tricky areas, but my character would never jump side-to-side like I wanted him to; instead he’d jump from one side and then graciously dive back down to the ground.”
As Hover is a game that revolves around movement and quick changes in direction, it would need its controls to be very tight and fluid to allow players to properly flow through the city, and not slam into the wall when you need to turn. Thankfully, the devs for Hover also knew this and made sure the controls were as slick as possible to not slow down the pace of the game.
Speaking of keeping the pace, a feature that I’m eternally grateful for is the rewind system. If you ever happen to screw up a jump badly, or realize you’ve jumped off the wrong building, then with the press of a button your character will float back to where you were a few seconds ago, allowing you to try again without climbing all the way back up to where you were. At first I thought this would be broken and remove any challenge to the races, but instead it allowed me to still have a fighting chance if I were to completely bomb one of the laps.
The only gripe I have with the controls is the jumping/scaling mechanic. You’re able to wall bounce from side-to-side to reach tricky areas, but my character would never jump side-to-side like I wanted him to; instead he’d jump from one side and then graciously dive back down to the ground.
One thing I do wish is implemented is a way to completely skip dialogue, instead of spam clicking your mouse because this is the fifth time you’ve retried this mission and your patience is spreading thin. That isn’t to say that the dialogue is bad, but after failing a mission for the umpteenth time the dialogue at the start is just more things to skip to reach the gameplay.
The music in this game needed to be top notch; something to keep the adrenaline pumping and to get you in the mood to break some laws. Thankfully Hideki Naganuma, the music composer from Jet Set Radio, stepped in to create some memorable and surprisingly good songs to run around to.
That being said, there are only so many times I can listen to the same bloody song that plays during all missions and races. These songs may be good on their own, but after listening to them on repeat for a good ten to fifteen minutes I was ready to mute it. I’d love to have a larger collection of songs, or to create my own mix of their songs, but sadly this isn’t the case.
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“Despite the slight learning curve, I still found myself drawn back to the game when I wanted to kill some time.”
As this is an early access game, I can only imagine that some of the issues that I include in this article will be sorted before long, so take them all with a pinch of salt. The game isn’t without its hindrances, but the good thing about early access games that the devs care about is that things will be changed.
Despite the slight learning curve, I still found myself drawn back to the game when I wanted to kill some time. It’s easy to lose yourself by just parkouring your way from A to B, and some fluid movements combined with the game’s tight controls (barring the bloody jumping) make it very easy to enjoy doing so. As it stands now, it’s a lot of fun to play and has enough content to warrant the $14.99 price tag, and can only grow from here.
*** PC key provided by the publisher ***
