Games worth discovering

Doing Parkour at the End of the World - Super Storm Review

22K View2022-07-04

To quote the apocryphal “Chinese curse,” we live in interesting times. And when I say that, what I mean is that it often feels like everything is on fire, like the whole world is one step from the brink of global disaster, and like very little can stop the ever-looming end of the human race. But hey, I’m just some weirdo who writes about video games! What do I know? And it could be worse, right? Our cities could be covered in lava, spiky death traps, and massive, angry dinosaurs!

If what we’re living through right now is the “boring apocalypse,” Super Storm represents the far opposite end of what we could imagine the end of the world being like. It is the rad apocalypse. There’s no story here per se, but the setup seems to be that you’re one of the (or maybe the only?) final survivors in a generically American, skyscraper-laden city that has been covered in lava, poison, spinning razor blades, and unnaturally colored foreboding clouds. Each of the game’s five- to ten-minute levels consists of leaping across the rooftops of this devastated world, hitting various checkpoints along the way until you finally reach your goal.

Super Storm is the bare-essentials kind of game that only has three real ways of interacting with the gameplay. There’s a virtual control stick for movement on the lower left-hand side of the screen; on the lower right-hand side, there are two buttons, one for jumping and one for ducking. But even that layout overstates the complexity of affairs here. In my entire playthrough I used the duck button approximately twice, and one of those times was in the tutorial level. This game is about running and jumping, about gaining speed and using that momentum to propel yourself through the catastrophic happenings around you.

The closest equivalent to Super Storm that I can come up with from games I’ve played previously is Mirror’s Edge. This is like Mirror’s Edge minus the story and with the unnervingly clean dystopia replaced by an unnervingly grimy armageddon. But there’s also less mechanical complexity in Super Storm. Your runner won’t be swinging from poles or sidling along narrow walkways. There are trampolines littered throughout the levels, as well as “speed strips” that provide much faster boosts to your running speed, but this game really does keep it about as simple as possible.

The good news is that simplicity works for what’s being presented here. Super Storm’s levels—as with the whole of the game—are short, sweet, and to the point. They can also be very challenging. I hit numerous points where I found myself caught in a loop of dying a dozen or so times to the same challenging leap before I finally figured out the perfect angle and speed to hit it from. But the levels are crafted in such a way as to ensure that these challenges are never too frustrating. Even in the most difficult endgame levels, there’s generally never more than a minute or so of running between checkpoints, and the game reloads satisfyingly quickly.

There is one caveat to those quick loads, however: Once every four or five deaths, Super Storm will make you watch a short ad before reloading. This is the small price to pay for an otherwise totally free experience, but if you’d rather not deal with it you can also do a one-time payment of $1.99 to get rid of ads in the game altogether.

End to end, Super Storm is a totally solid, engaging little game, though it’s hard not to feel like there’s a missed opportunity for more. I was able to complete every level in the game, including the two extra-tough bonus trials, in about three or four hours. The game’s menu lists these levels under the heading “Season 1,” suggesting that more could be coming in the future, but it’s been over a year since Super Storm’s release and over six months since its last update and still nothing. I’d certainly love to take on more sets of levels in different locations and scenarios, and that would also give the developers at Isakov Studio a chance to expand on the mechanics and introduce some more complexity to the game.

For what it is, though, especially as a completely free-to-play game, Super Storm is worth spending some time with. Let’s be honest, we need all the distractions we can get right now, and this will do for at least a few hours. It could be better, sure, but that’s not the end of the world. Or is it?

SCORE: 3 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Super Meat Boy. While the first-person parkour brings to mind Mirror’s Edge, the tight level design and short, quick-reload death loops of Super Storm end up feeling more akin to the brutal platforming of something like Super Meat Boy. Just don’t expect it to be quite that hard and not nearly as full of content.

• Using shiny toys to distract yourself from the rapid deterioration of the world outside your window. While we probably won’t get the cities flooded with lava and lava-powered dinosaurs of Super Storm, global warming is definitely quickly progressing towards a very bleak world. Luckily, we have mobile games to distract us! I don’t mean to sound like I’m being critical of you for playing a game instead of saving the world; after all, writing about games is my job. There’s nothing any of us can do but push back as best we can against the massive, all-powerful institutional forces that have set us on this path toward destruction, and finding small moments of joy to prevent yourself from going insane is a key part of the process. Good luck in the wasteland, comrades!

💬 Have you taken a run through the strange future world of Super Storm? Let us know what you think in the comments! And if not, tell us how you’re preparing for the dark, dino-infested future where parkour will be your only hope for survival?

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