Tremulous Thoughts: Power Hover: Cruise
Oddrok’s hoverboarding adventure gets a free-to-play makeover, but doesn’t quite do enough to earn full sequel status.
Sometimes you’ve got to rephrase a good idea to get people to realize its brilliance.
Helsinki-based indie team Oddrok opted to give their slick mobile hoverboarding adventure Power Hover (now available on Mac & PC too, BTW) another go to reach a broader audience, and while Power Hover: Cruise doesn’t reinvent the experience enough to be considered a brand new entry in the fledgling series, it could prove to be a solid introduction for many who might have hesitated before.
The best parts of the original Power Hover were its boss levels, the game’s take on the endless-runner play mode that built an entire genre of mobile titles. By punctuating each individual set of levels with one final challenge that dropped the game’s regular collect-’em-all gameplay loop in favor of measuring the player’s pure skill at avoiding obstacles, the boss levels became a highlight of the game, proving to be a reliable hook to bring players back even after they’d plowed through the linear preludes.
It was only natural, then, that an evolution on the Power Hover formula would come back to this idea more prominently. Enter Cruise, a free-to-play title that doesn’t quite act as a sequel, but nevertheless packages the original’s best ideas in a format mobile game fans are more likely to ‘get.’
The new game is a lighter experience than the original, focusing solely on a set of four endless levels that borrow most of their elements from the previous entry’s boss levels. (Ted Striker’s excellent soundtrack from the original also makes a comeback.) Aside from a few visual tweaks and some new obstacles to avoid, the levels present in the game at launch are easily recognizable and don’t particularly seem concerned with flipping any of the ideas from OG Power Hover on their head; if you’re looking for something brand new, this ain’t it.
Where Oddrok does choose to shake up the formula is in the new game’s player characters, with the original cast of ‘bots returning alongside some new additions. Your choice in which robot to ride with has a bit more weight in Cruise, with each pick having a different level of handling and number of hits the player can take before going down.
Cue the monetization strategy! Each character can be unlocked either by buying them one by one for $3, in a bundle for $9, or by hitting their specific score target in one of the levels. (Buying a character also gets rid of the in-game ads, which are, y’know, there, and thankfully aren’t quite as obnoxious as other mobile titles; if you die, you can keep your run going by watching a commercial, and the final score screen for each run shows some promotional stuff for Oddrok’s previous games, and that’s pretty much it.) The idea here is sound, and it’s notably more player-friendly than the usual mobile game schemes, but the original game’s $3 price tag makes it a little harder to swing it, especially for the established fan.
Calling Cruise a demo for the original game wouldn’t do it justice, but it isn’t quite its own game either — at least, not yet. If Oddrok ends up expanding the game with more levels and unique experiences that can’t be found in its predecessor, it might get there, and the studio’s working from a solid foundation — last year I called the original “a smooth, enjoyable ride through a variety of locales,” and that’s as true as ever this time around.
Playing it after trying Oddrok’s first entry in the series may feel a bit hollow, but newcomers should hopefully find a lot to love.
Power Hover: Cruise is available on the App Store for free. The original game, Power Hover, is on the Google Play Store for free ($3 to unlock everything) and on the App Store for $3.
