The legend that was Evel Knievel is the main inspiration for all of the platforming racing games that ever were or will be. Games like the Trials series and the billion of clones on the AppStore, PlayStore, Consoles, PC, you name it, to this day have never truly paid respect to the legend himself.
Barnstorm Games changes that by releasing, a couple of days ago, the game Evel Knievel a platform racer which is a perfect tribute to his figure. During his life Evel Knievel jumped his bikes across cars, trucks, caravans, buses you name it, he probably jumped over them. Then there were some weird "obstacles" like a tank filled with sharks, big real scary sharks.
The game perfectly recreates these scenarios as it follows his real timeline starting from his "small" beginnings in 1965 on Moses Lake jumping over living snakes and mountain lions using his 250 Scrambler to his glory days in 1967 in Las Vegas. As you progress and win trophies, you earn coins which you use to buy new bikes you have to use to beat previous times winning a better trophy earning you more coins and well, this is a big problem in the game.
While the driving physics are good with the bikes feeling heavy as they should and the speed being just about right, the coins system undermines the whole experience. See in order to complete the final level of each location you have to use a newer better bike and that's ok as serves as progression in the game. However you have to buy these bikes and while the first two are cheap, to buy the later ones you have to replay the previous levels to earn silver and gold trophies. Now we come to the big problem. The newer bikes are faster, much faster than the first ones, so when you are replaying previous levels you are more than likely to overshoot landings, crash into flaming hoops, cranes and other obstacles.
And beating the levels within the time limit is borderline impossible since they are not designed for the faster better bikes, so to buy the bikes needed to complete the later locations is a total grind collecting coins in the levels over and over again. I don't want to do that, no one wants to do that. Maybe if the game was a freemium where you could use real money to "unlock" the new bikes, this grind would make sense, but since it is a premium game priced at $1.99 it doesn't make much sense.
So should you spend 2 bucks for this game? Well, I mean 2 bucks that's like nothing so you better be the judge of that. What you get is a good platform racer with some stupid design flaws, a killer presentation with a fantastic vibrant artstyle and killer soundtrack, and finally a trip down the life of one of the most badass daredevil that has ever lived with his signature bikes, uniforms and helmets to unlock. Thanks for reading!
