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Okay, so I’m going to cheat on this one a bit. To start off, Lepcis sort of already nailed this one in a fantastic article about the first BIT.TRIP runner game found here. Secondly, I’ve watched my wife play and beat BIT.TRIP Presents… Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien (hereon referred to in this article as BT2 because that title is ridiculously long even in acronym form). Add to this that I myself have beaten the original BT, I feel fairly justified in just giving this a review after a meager 3 minutes of play.
Borrowing from Lepcis, BT at its core exhibits the frustrating concept of demanding perfection from the player in order to progress within the game. BT2 does its best to distract, sugar-coat and otherwise hide this flawed core mechanic. The game is now largely 3-D with odd and interesting environments. The game now sports silly cutscenes featuring the kind of theme found in a Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon (narrator talking quickly in a nasally voice, the word “our hero” used frequently). You now choose levels from a little map with optional levels instead of from a menu. There is a much wider variety of obstacles within the levels, as well as split paths that you can take–sort of akin to adding more doodads on a Bop-It. The last addition was probably the closest thing to legitimately fixing the perfection requirement. Scattered about the level are checkpoints that let you restart from them in case you mess up. The problem is though, that this is simply an artificial fix–the chunks that you run through before hitting a checkpoint still must be done in perfection in order to proceed, and now since the developers know that there are checkpoints, the levels are much longer than BT, nearer to the end of the game.
While these upgrades from the original certainly make a game that is a little more appealing, it’s still a game about perfection. I feel that if the game allowed you to make mistakes but gave you a score penalty for each mistake you made, and then later on in the minimap had doors that couldn’t be opened until your cumulative score across all levels reached a certain number, the game would still carry the same spirit and yet be improved. This would allow you to continue progression to other levels with a lot more freedom and then have more of a motivation to visit the older levels if you ran into a roadblock. As it stands though, Tier 3 BT2’s grade. I just can’t justify grinding through another set of levels where I’m required to do nothing more than press a precise set of buttons in a precise order. It’s akin to my hatred of any almost every puzzle game.
