Mushrun

Runner games are not difficult to design, but they are very difficult to get right. In short, they have to keep players entertained for quite some time to be worth the effort, but they usually do not feature a story, compelling characters or new gameplay mechanics. Instead, they have to provide the players with a challenging and non-repetitive experience.

Mushrun is a fairly simple runner game in which the goal is to keep going for as long as possible and collect all the mushrooms that you can. There are no special rewards for doing well, nor are there more levels to overcome. In fact, there’s only one difficulty level as well, which means that there’s a real risk you might get bored after only a few minutes.

In short, the only thing that keeps track of your progress is the number of mushrooms you collect. However, it’s also possible to forget all about them and just jump over the obstacles until you get too bored to go on, because there are no penalties to stop you from doing this. In fact, there is no high score system either, so you have to remember your best score.

Besides jumping, your character can also move slightly either to the left or to the right of the screen, although this doesn’t appear to slow him down, except for a few seconds as you are doing it. This can be of help sometimes, especially if you miscalculate a jump and you need an extra second to take the leap. On the other hand, it’s difficult to believe you are going to be so involved with the game.

Lastly, the worst offender is the level design itself, because you are always going past the same backgrounds, with barely any variations. Only a handful of trees decorate the backdrops, which makes it difficult to feel like you are actually achieving something. Hence, it doesn’t take long to get extremely bored, especially if you are a fan of the genre and are aware of better games than this.

In the end, Mushrun does not have what it takes to keep you busy for longer than a few minutes, which is pretty bad even for a runner. Thus, it needs more variety and better gameplay mechanics to stand a chance on the market.