Despite its creative and beautiful visuals, this runner is held back by too random randomspawn systems, unclear trick rules and absurdly steep character prices. With some work, this can be one of the best endless games in the appstore, it has a 5/5 potential, but currently it does not deserve more than a 3,5. Dont let looks deceive you - a game is a complete package, not just graphics. Even at that, everyone should try it. I hope they continue to work on it and it livrs up to its potential.
I respectfully disagree Randomness is an integral part of endless runners so if it's an issue then it's a genre issue I'm not sure what you mean by unclear trick rules? It's pretty simple - do a trick at the top of a hill and if you time it right you get clips. That's pretty much all there is to it as far i know They've also seem to upped the rate by which you earn clips in this update, that or the reduced difficulty on the first 2 stages just makes it easier to earn them. Bump owls, tricks at the top of hills, acorns, collecting golden leaves etc. will earn you clips and with the update the controls are very smooth and responsive Easily one of the best runners in my book
I agree, it is one of the best. I just say it has issues holding it back. Randomness is indeed integral, I have not declined that. At times, its unfairly random. When constructing random code, one must remember to exclude specific combinations that might occur, that may result in unfair gameplay. Surely this has been applied here also, but at times the game spawns unavoidable obstacles none the less - meaning an issue waiting to be resolved. The case is similar with the first versions of Sonic Dash.
Thanks for your feedback Istako. You are 100% right that true randomness is dangerous in a game like this. Unhindered the terrain could perhaps generate a sequence where it would just be impossible to pass - and that would be hugely unfair to the player. We have spent a long time working on our object generation rules to make sure this cannot happen, and we're pretty sure we have made it impossible for there to be any 'no win' situations. There is no doubt though, that some runs will be tougher than others, and that especially as you get further 'down the hill' and the game gets trickier, it can be very challenging - but we think and hope that is what players of infinite runners want? Getting that bit further feels fantastic if you've felt as though you really have to work for it. That's one of the things we like most in other runners, and it is part of what inspired us to make Shred It! Balance is incredibly difficult though. No two players have the same capabilities or even the same playing style. So please rest assured that we are listening to our players closely and will try to make it a game we hope everyone will love - AND think is fair Shred It! Support
Thanks for this . It's good to know that people appreciate that we're listening to players and updating the game accordingly. On character prices, they are actually a lot more achievable than some characters in games like Subway Surfers. They also each have a special power so there's more value than just visuals. And as you mentioned, in this update we have changed things to give more currency even for normal plays, and introduced a daily challenge which, if completed, will usually earn 3-400 Clips by doing the runs required to do the tasks, and then there's a bonus of 75-200 on top. Again, balance is a difficult thing, and it costs a lot of money to make characters, outfits and the game itself, so we need to try to find some fair way to cover those costs and, ideally, let us afford to keep updating the game. Shred It! Support
True. Thanks for the reply. I just have several times jumped, simply to find a sequence of trees or rocks infront of me, it is unpassable, yet the game deceived me to go there, by having a feather to pick up or something, and since the horizon has a scrolling effect when its uphill, its hard to tell if there is such a unpassable sequence ahead. These were the situations I was reffering to. I just ended my run, again like so. I believe this to be a no win situation. Sure, I could have gone the opposite way, but that way I could not have gotten the feather. This is a inner conflict - offering a reward in exchange for game over or continuing to have fun isnt a choice that should be offered to the player. This has nothing to do with a game being more challenging or hard, this is "I wanna be the guy" logic. But I got your drift, just wanted to go into detail about what I was talking about. And I was thinking a stick on the left side with which to control and a button on the right with which to jump might work pretty well in this game. At times I find the controls counter intuitive, particularly when I have to jump and move at the same time. Practice makes perfect - true, but having the choice would be nice. Might be just me though. I hope I do not sound aggrovating to people, I am trying to give some hyperbolised, in depth feedback. As a dev, I know how important this is, and how often people get lost in the things they like and forget to mention the little things. I hope I dont come off as someone who dislikes The game. Anyway, good to see the dev is here and taking so much care what people think. Congratulations to you guys, I will support you via a iap as soon as possible. =] PS: are the monster costumes available for purchase just during halloween, or will they be available later too? UPDATE: I also noticed what felt a bit weird during gameplay - jumping costs momentum, and further more - jumping is not affected by momentum of turning (or any movement). Is there a particular reason for thus? I think gameflow would be better if more momentum was added.
Regarding the random generation creating unfair obstacles, for a while when I first started playing, I thought the same thing. It seemed like sometimes there would be sequences of obstacles that were impossible to get past, at least given the information you could see before reaching the obstacles. The funny thing is that as I've practiced more, I've pretty much stopped encountering those situations. This is because I've gotten better at spotting certain combinations of obstacles that I've seen before and knowing what the right way through them will be. There are definitely situations where the game tries to tempt you into an impossible situation, but I find that to be part of the fun, having to make split second decisions to pass up getting some leaves because it will lead you into a crash. Regarding feathers specifically, at first it seemed to me there were often feathers in impossible locations, but again through practice I've figured out how to get almost all of them. In some cases there is a feather on top of a rock, with obstacles soon after the rock. At first those seemed impossible, but I've learned that if you learn just the right place to jump over, and take advantage of the fact that you can steer in the air after jumping, you can avoid the obstacles after the jump. There are still one or two feathers I've encountered that I think might have been impossible to get. Now that it saves video of runs, if it happens again I'll watch the video and see if it really was impossible or if I just missed it, and post the video. The one thing I do think is a little unfair regarding obstacles, is there are rocks and logs near the edges of the trail, some of which you can squeeze by along the edge and some which are too close to the edge to pass. It's sometimes hard to visually tell the difference between a log that you can pass and one that you can't. This seems bit cheap to me. I'm all for the game being difficult, but I'd like the difficulty to come from needing to react quickly and accurately, not from being unable to accurately estimate the exact width of a gap. This is pretty infrequent though so not a big deal.
This site isn't all about the good reviews, looks like some are jumping on others who are just giving their opinions, and the constructive criticism should be payed attention to more by the devs, than mere "The game is soooo great" posts. Because some say that about every game they try. I've tried it out last 2 days now, and yes, it looks great, but it's a bit fiddly - often when I'm sure I've cleared a log/tree trunk/obstacle with a jump, the character falls over on his face. He blatantly did not hit it, but still fell over. Seems a bit of a cheap trick to get me to continue, using the paperclips. And then of course, buy some when they run out! Collision detection is definitely a bit off. I've tried over and over jumping over obstacles, to see if same thing happens. It does, he clearly looks like he's cleared it easily, yet falls flat on his face. It needs work. The controls aren't as smooth as they could be, it'll stagger every now and then, could be that I'm on an ipad mini? But I play more advanced games than this on it, and they never stutter. Needs more accessible characters, that actually look different to one another and have different moves. Needs more varied levels IMO too. I know I would eventually get bored of the same downslope. Same, in style/atmosphere I mean. For now I'd give it a 3 star. If the things I mentioned were fixed, it would be 4, and maybe 5 with more variety.
Also, regarding additional characters costing too much, I disagree. In a free-to-play game there has to be some incentive for people to spend money other than them just feeling charitable. The base game in this case is completely fun to play, and has no timers to slow you down, and the optional extra characters are not at all necessary to excel on the leaderboards. So I think it's completely reasonable that saving up for another character by playing takes a while, since that's really the only thing in the game which costs enough to possibly motivate a player to spend some real money. Personally, once I got the update which fixed the controls, I immediately spent $3 on some clips and bought a couple of characters. I got the snowman and dog characters, and they're both pretty fun, both for their appearance and their extra ability. However having them also confirmed to me that the extra characters are not at all necessary to play the game, and don't give you any big advantage over players who haven't bought an extra character. So the free version of the game is complete and doesn't require any waiting or grinding.
I don't see anyone jumping on anyone else in this thread, we're just discussing our opinions. I do agree with some of what you said. It's not always as visually obvious as in some games when you're going to collide with something. It took me a bit of trial and error to learn which obstacles you can jump over and which you can't. It is very consistent what you will and won't hit, and so can be learned. So I don't agree that it's done for a nefarious motive such as trying to get you to buy continues. I think part of the problem is that there is a greater variety of obstacles than in some games, though I think that's also part of the charm. Instead of there being just one or two kinds of sticks or stumps or rocks, there are lots of different shapes. On the one hand this gives the game a nice organic feeling, but on the other hand it makes it harder to quickly recognize what to do compared to something like Temple Run where everything is more distinct. I personally really like the controls now since the latest update, but control preferences are always a very subjective thing. As for stuttering, the game is usually completely smooth on my iPad 4, but occasionally since the latest update, it will completely freeze in the middle of a run for a couple of seconds, and then when it starts up again I've often lost my rhythm and crash. It doesn't happen often but I hope it gets fixed. Regarding levels, they do change quite a bit once you get farther into the game, but you have to be able to make it past the first stages before you see the new content. I always find that to be a weakness of endless games, that you have to start from the same place every time.
Please don't apologise, all feedback is welcome - and things people don't like are very important to us. As Bilboa said, there is a certain amount of learning to do. There should be no sequence that you cannot beat, however some are definitely harder than others. I've played the game 1,000s of times and there are times when I see something coming and decide not to take the risk and avoid rather than negotiate it. Sometimes I decide to go for it. I don't always make it, but it feels good when I do. We have actually made leaf collection easier in the first two stages, but they are still quite hard later. We think they should be. They are intended to be a temptation. You don't need to go for them, but the choice is yours. And the reward is good if you get them. Our goal is to try to give people choices about what to do as you run down the hill so as to make the game more interesting. On costumes, the Halloween ones will stay. We've also just made the Frankenstein costume for Parker (the boy boarder) free . On button controls, we have discussed this, and we have trialled it along with tilt even, but feel so far that it's better to spend the time we have perfecting the main control system. Lastly, on 'momentum', there are definitely some things where we 'gamify' the physics. We have done a lot of work on this and a lot of playtesting and have made decisions on this that we think give the best feel. Like everything else though, we are listening, and if a lot of people feel this is an issue then we'll look at it again. Hope this helps. Shred It! Support
Hi Cagey, Shred It! support here. I hope if you read the whole thread you'll agree that whilst it's nice to hear people say good things about the game, we actually are a lot more interested in hearing things people have problems with. People don't say bad things about a game just to be mean, it's because they genuinely have issues. We want to hear about them - and we want to fix them, so please keep reporting! Bilboa hit the collision issue you mention on the nose. Our goal was to create a fully organic world, that was NOT on rails. Most infinite runners have three channels - left, right, centre. And set vertical levels. With such a system players know if they're on the right channel at the right time they are safe. With Shred It you have a fully free movement system. This means that obstacles are not placed on fixed channels. We also want to make them look real, and the environment look real, and so inevitably there will be times where you might hit an object that you thought you'd cleared. Believe it or not, the actual collision areas for a lot of these obstacles are much smaller than the obstacles themselves just so they would not seem unfair. It may be that we need to tweak some of those further though. We'll be watching Everyplay videos and trying to see what are the obstacles people are failing on and see if there are any patterns showing things which might be unfair. Believe me though, we are NOT doing this to try to scam people out of Clips (and money). That kind of thing angers us, and we know it would anger players too. With characters, outfits, ads and gameplay, we go out of our way to be fair to our players, whilst still trying to make some money to cover the cost of making the game. Shred It! Support
That freezing on the iPad 4 is worrying. We've not seen that before, and the iPad 4 should have no problems whatsoever in running the game. We will check out what might be causing that. Your point on infinite runners is a fair one, but it's the nature of the beast I think. If you have 'respawn' points then it kinda breaks the whole concept. Hopefully there are some nice visual and gameplay treats that make it worth the effort for people to get further down the hill . Shred It! Support
Thanks for the reply again. Ive not played since I completed the daily challanges last night, and when I started the game today it crashes. =[ a reboot didnt fix it, im playing on a iPad2 and the game just crahses on the GM studios loading screen. Ill lose my points if I reinstall, wont I?
Thanks for your responses. Regarding the freezing, the game definitely performs very smoothly on my iPad. The freezing I'm talking about doesn't seem like the normal stuttering I get when the device's hardware can't keep up with a game. The game will run completely smoothly, and then just completely freeze for several seconds, before resuming. I think the pauses have been longer when I'm playing somewhere with a poor internet connection, which makes me guess that it's trying to do some communication and freezing the game while it does so. That might have just been coincidence though. I definitely meant my comment about having to repeat the beginning on every run as a comment about the genre of game, and not this game in particular. I think this game does a good job of mixing things up while still keeping each run similar enough that the scores can be comparable. I do find the different stages to be different enough to keep things interesting. I can pretty regularly make it to the fourth stage, but haven't made it past the fourth. The bears swiping at me always give me a chuckle. In the future assuming the game does well, it would be cool if you made some more slopes that players could start from.
I'm not trying to be harsh, but too often people just say "This is amazeballs" - without being truly helpful or honest. The some will just like anything that comes out, and that's fine for them. I'm very picky about what games I'll keep installed. Just how I am. I never mind spending money on ones I like at the same time. Everyone's opinion should be stand alone, and it is constructive rather than nit picking here. It may well not be linear, bar the track being much the same every time, But I see the same-ish patterns on it over and over. I don't see what this has to do with what I pointed out though? My criticism was to do with collision detection. I mean when I clear obstacles, he's still falling. If I had the programs in place to record some gameplay I would. This isn't a small detail that you should be watching when others play, it should have been sorted in testing really. He 'clears' the obstacle - he still falls. Basically. There is nothing on the spot where he lands, he should not fall over. And I don't see how you "go out of your way" because it's your business it's how you make money, it's nothing doing us a favour. I'd have paid $2 for the game, no problem, with items unlockable through actual play
You do actually with the latest version of the game. When a run ends, if you tap the share button, one of the options is to share a video of your run. You can also watch the saved video right then to see if you still think the same thing on re-watching. So if you're sure you've just crashed because of something unfair in the game, you could share the video so others can see what you're talking about.
