Bust-N-Rush (PC) Preview: SMASH TIME

Rachel Gray / Jul 24th, 2012 No Comments

Although I’ve only played the alpha version of Bust-N-Rush, this arcade runner game was pretty fun. If you’re a fanatic who loves dominating leaderboards and replaying levels to collect all possible achievements, Techtonics Games made this game for you. Bust-N-Rush is a high energy runner and you’ll only be utilizing four of your five fingers (probably on your left hand), so the game requires concentration and obedient digits. You’re going to be smashing into and jumping over a lot of obstacles almost simultaneously, so this game also might take some practice.

Bust-N-Rush by Techtonic Games

In Bust-N-Rush you play Kovo, a man of great strength who strangely resembles The Thing from The Fantastic Four. When beginning the game, you find Kovo relaxing on his astro-turf flat, outlined by a white picket fence and accompanied by a pink yard flamingo. Seems Kovo’s just living the American dream, listening to his radio when The Satellite of Wub (or as I dubbed him, SWUBS) abruptly attacks his home. The assault quickly becomes a declaration of war as it brutally crushes Kovo’s plastic flamingo. In retaliation Kovo ransacks the hallways of his own home by smashing Toyota-sized boulders with his body. No, I am not really sure what’s going on or how Kovo is going to clean up all those smashed rocks but I do know he is going to avenge his flamingo and bring SWUBS to justice.

For the most part the mechanics of the game rolled smoothly. Occasionally there was a light lag but nothing that impaired my gameplay. If you experience lagging or poor refresh rates there are resolution options for you to adjust under the settings tab. Otherwise, feel free to bum-rush Kovo into every ominous obstacle you see. Objects will be outlined in color to signify just how deadly they are. Red is bad, blue is good, gold is super good. It took me a while to train my fingers and I hit more red than blue and died 1000001 times. I died so much I began to wonder if Kovo was in Purgatory or if this were some twisted version of Groundhog Day. Regardless, the more I died the less likely Kovo was going to ever see his pink flamingo again so I started honing my skills and scoring serious points. When avoiding red obstacles and aiming for blue, you’re really going to want to rush Kovo with the appropriate key instead of just casually bumping into it. That’s how you score big and this game is all about scoring big.

Bust-N-Rush really is a lot of fun and although it’s not a very complex, story driven game I still kept wanting to break open my laptop and bust up some stuff. The graphics are what you would expect for a 3D arcade runner game: sort of choppy, sort of cartoonish, and not really designed to “wow” you. They’re appropriate for the game and fit the overall attitude of the story.

Bust-N-Rush from Techtonic Games

If you need a story reminder, you’re playing an overgrown, husky looking dude who recluses underground with a plastic yard flamingo. Also, you’re wearing some sort of armor looking backpack that tracks your health. Whenever you collide with a malevolent object, you lose life. You lose a lot of life, actually. Four hits with a bad rock or lava spout and you’re dead. You can collect “scorbs” which add a few points to your health but I found them to be relatively unhelpful considering they added so little to your health (at least in demo). “Super-scorbs” are gold and when activated increase the amount of normal scorbs in your immediate area. But again, I was pretty clumsy with the controls and either didn’t collect enough scorbs for them to help or just missed the super-scorb altogether. That’s human error for sure but still left a feeling of “do not get hit even once or I will never see my flamingo friend again.” I was really worried about the flamingo.

Although I wasn’t able to play all the available worlds, the official game will include multiple levels for Kovo to run through and decimate with his face. There’s 3 different play options as well: quest mode, survival mode, and Bust-a-Friend. Quest mode has 3 difficulty settings (easy, hard, insane) and I always played on easy because I have terrible hand-eye coordination. There are currently 61 achievements and I managed to collect a few, including “survive for 15 seconds” which took me 2 attempts. It seems Bust-N-Rush is going to offer enough diversity in levels and achievements to keep people playing, not to mention the game itself is actually very fun.

Overall I really enjoyed the alpha demo for Bust-N-Rush. I got to play a protagonist that could be mistaken for a mountain and I had a lot of stuff to obliterate. I look forward to the official release for Bust-N-Rush which is scheduled to launch July 31. It will be available on Windows, Mac, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and there are plans to release the game for both Android tablets and iPads in the near future.

Bio
Twitter
Google+
Latest Posts

Rachel Gray

Content Specialist at Gaming Illustrated

Rachel is a game aficionada who lives with her tuxedo cat, Ernest. Some of her favorite things include bears, Chik-fil-a chick-n-minis, White Russians, and Silent Hill 2. When jogging, Rachel attaches her mp3 arm attachment to her wrist and pretends it is a Pip-Boy.