After a little over a week away, I’m finally back and getting back into the swing of things. When I announced that I’d be gone for a week, I mentioned that it wasn’t likely that I’d be able to cover anything. That wasn’t entirely true—the Nintendo Switch’s portability made covering a shorter game possible, and one such game stood out among the others: Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield, a series of 13 runner levels that tasks you with performing four color-coded inputs to avoid obstacles on your way to the goal. I don’t have an enormous amount of experience with runner games given that so many of them are endless and investing time into something without an ending has always struck me as frustratingly Sisyphean, but I’ve played enough of them to recognize how much fun they can be when everything clicks. Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield clicks in many of those ways.

However, it also stumbles in enough ways that it never quite brought out my inner competitiveness. Games like this derive most of their value from repeated plays as you improve your skills and shave minutes off of your times, but there are points in Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield where speeding up screws with the timing of stage obstacle triggers, making it impossible to avoid being sent back to a checkpoint. Action colors also don’t correspond to the colored buttons of an Xbox controller, and while I was playing on Switch, I (and I’d wager most gamers) have a decade worth of muscle memory that can be difficult to suppress in reflex-based games. It’s very possible to enjoy Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield despite these issues, especially given its stylish visuals and entertaining soundtrack, but the gameplay needs a few tweaks to make obtaining better times more comfortable and fair.

Be sure to read the game’s store page because the story is wordless and confusing

Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield‘s story doesn’t have any words in it. Characters act and react in a futuristic world, and it’s very difficult to get a sense of what specifically is happening in many scenes. From the looks of it, there’s a hero character and an antagonist character, but I frequently confused them thanks to the hero’s hair changing in Cutscenes (as well as his wardrobe changing as I unlocked new patterns and equipped them). The store page claims that the hero’s name is Wally and that he recovers something that was taken from him, but it also mentions exposing the truth and uncovering the mystery of what happened to him. That’s a generous way of describing cutscenes filled with poses, parkour, and being chased.

At the end of the day, Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield‘s story didn’t end up being a negative. It’s confusing and has some strange moments, but the cutscenes are stylish and many runner games don’t have stories at all. The cutscenes are also short and to the point, so I was never tempted to skip them despite the prominence of the skip prompt.

Speaking of Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield‘s cutscenes, they run at 60 FPS on the Nintendo Switch (though with occasional dips down to the high 50s). That’s in contrast to the gameplay itself, which tends to stick in the 40-50 FPS range for the most part, not counting the occasional short hiccups in certain stages. I suspect that this is because stages are large by necessity, whereas cutscenes can take place in much smaller areas that the Switch’s weaker hardware can easily deal with.

Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield is a runner with style, attitude, and strange hit detection

Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield‘s gameplay couldn’t be easier to explain. Wally runs to the right and encounters four color-coded obstacle types that require him to jump, high jump, slide, or run. There are three difficulties to select from, with the first two conferring a type of bullet-time slowdown effect as you reach an obstacle to help you better react to it, which can make parts of the game easy but is nevertheless handy given how busy some of the stages can become. Part of the difficulty comes from how well stages overload your senses; you get brief warnings of upcoming hazards, but recognizing that you’ve made it past an obstacle and noticing the next prompt can be incredibly tricky without the aid of the slowdown feature.

At its best, Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield is an enjoyable ballet of jumping and sliding past obstacles that can become tricky thanks to how the game turns your expectations against you. For example, one section of an early stage consists of a small bridge that you ascend and can safely jump on, only for a later section to turn that same type of bridge 90 degrees and require sliding under it. Assuming that it’s a normal bridge and jumping results in a collision that sends you back to a checkpoint.

One of the main reasons I continually made mistakes like that was my temptation to play while sprinting instead of remaining at the default running speed. Doing so would ideally be the best way of finishing stages quickly and help to reduce how much downtime there is between obstacles, but rushing like this ends up being more trouble than it’s worth, highlighting awkward peculiarities of the mechanics.

One such oddity is how Wally can slam into a gate and avoid colliding with it because you were pressing the jump button. Hit detection strangeness cuts both ways, however, and combining a run and a jump to clear some mines instead of sliding under them will result in Wally dropping dead in the air before touching anything. Running is used to crash through certain types of doors, but it only works if you’re pressing the button, even if your speed appears to remain constant. And worst of all, running can cause obstacles like car crashes to occur too late, making it impossible to slide under them like you’re supposed to. Knowing that going fast is a death sentence in a game that tasks you with finishing stages as quickly as possible killed any interest I had in optimizing my times and resulted in some uneven difficulty. Fortunately, much of this strangeness could end up fixed in a patch.

The visuals and music in Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield have plenty of personality to them

Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield is a colorful game, and that’s something I can always appreciate. It isn’t just the color, though, but how it’s used; instead of the generic glow effect that most developers tend to settle for, Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield uses Ben-Day dots and gradients to create an incredibly unique glow effect that it uses to great effect throughout its cutscenes and stages. Good art styles are a dime a dozen, but truly unique approaches like this are far rarer. My only reservation is how distracting foreground and background objects can become; at one point, some upcoming cars were highlighted red when they were in the part of the screen that indicates the next obstacle type despite not being the next obstacle, causing me to jump instead of sliding. Distractions can make playing without the slow-motion a pain since you can only see a small part of the stage ahead of you.

The soundtrack, composed by Detroit artist “Danime-Sama,” is another bright spot. I’m not sure what genre this technically falls under because genres are inflexible and should be shot into the sun, but Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield‘s music is a fantastic combination of frenetic hip hop drums, strings, vocals, and some more jazzy elements. I’ve heard vaguely similar tracks during parts of Cowboy Bebop, and some of the strings also reminded me of portions of Remember Me and Buck Bumble‘s fantastic soundtracks. Honestly, it’s so good that it dulls many of the gameplay frustrations.

Story: N/A Gameplay: 4/6 Visuals: 1.5/2 Music: 1.5/2 ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ – 7/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Nintendo Switch key was provided for this Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield review. It came through 2 days ago, so my Switch doesn’t display a playtime yet, but I’d guess that it took 1-3 hours to finish.

Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield review – Running in style first appeared on Killa Penguin