We’re creeping up on the three year anniversary of Spunge Games looking for a batch of beta testers back in January 2017 for an upcoming game called Faily Skater (Free), a spinoff of their mega popular Faily Brakes game that starred an injury prone skateboarder. The game released the following July and has amassed more than 5 million players in that time. However, despite this popularity many Faily Skater players voiced their opinions on things they wished were different about the game, and Spunge tended to agree with a lot of it. The chief complaint was that Faily Skater missed the “core skateboarding game" feel and players were too scared to try and land cool tricks or combos for fear of bailing and ending their run. Plus there wasn’t really any incentive to try and do cool stuff in the first place since distance was the only metric that mattered. Thus it made the game just another endless runner with a skateboarding theme rather than something that felt like an actual skateboarding game.

Spunge is hoping to fix all this with a massive gameplay revamp to Faily Skater planned for release next year. First off many of the more minor obstacles in the game that would make for an instant crash can now be plowed right through, so yeah, go ahead and slam right into that pedestrian! There’s also a new combo system that encourages landing tricks in succession and building up a score multiplier, but perhaps more importantly combos will also fill up the new Heart Meter. If you crash while it’s filled you’ll be able to use it to instantly continue on your run, but the meter slowly empties while tricks aren’t being performed so this whole “extra chance" mechanic should really encourage you to actively be doing stuff during your runs. Finally, landing big airs and grinds will build up your speed to a point that you’ll be able to smash right through some of the more major obstacles in the game, like telephone poles, trees, benches, and more, meaning that there’s even less chance of you botching a run just for trying to have some fun. Here’s an early look at this new version.

It seems like all the planned changes in Faily Skater are geared towards encouraging people to actually explore the levels a little more, try for cool tricks more often, and basically throw caution to the wind. I mean it’s street skating after all. If you’d like to get in on this new version and offer up feedback to Spunge to help shape its final outcome, then head over to our forums and drop your Testflight email there and the developers will shoot you the beta version of the new Faily Skater. And it doesn’t stop just at the gameplay either as Spunge plans on revamping all the menus and UI and other facets of the game while they’re tinkering around with things. I’m sure they’d love as much feedback on all of this as possible, so be sure to register your interest in the forums if you’re interested in beta testing and look for the all new Faily Skater update to arrive sometime in early 2020.