Early Access Impressions – Hover: Revolt of Gamers

Hover: Revolt of Gamers is a stylish open world platformer, with a look comparable Jet Set Radio. In it you play as a ‘gamer’ with plenty of parkour skills who is part of a group set on overthrowing the authorities who have established a thoroughly anti-video-game society. It recently released on Steam Early Access and if you ask me, it’s come out much too early.

Beyond the initial couple of hours I spent with the game I was struggling to find much else to do in it, and I wasn’t sure whether that was because missions and objectives were so hard to find, or just a lack of content in general.

Without any sort of functional map, it was difficult to know where everything was. The area that you explore in the game requires a lot of vertical movement to navigate so I can imagine it would be pretty hard to map, but the solution otherwise presented doesn’t help much either. Basically you can hold down a button and objects, missions and (if you are playing online) other players will appear as squares on your vision, kind of like a 3D radar, and will be larger the closer they are. This gives no indication as to how to navigate the area in order to reach those points, it figuratively draws a straight line from you to it and tells you how far that is.

Missions take place within the main area and are mostly getting from point A to B, or a course with multiple laps. They’re actually great fun. Checkpoints are placed well to ensure you make use of your platforming skills effectively. In case you do fall away from the mission (as some do take place on fairly high points of the map) there is a rewind feature that takes you back to a previous position. Moving around feels really good and the game controls really well with an Xbox 360 controller, although the user interface in menus is still more suited to keyboard and mouse.

Completing missions and finding various collectibles results in gaining experience point to level up, because every has to have levelling up now. Saying that it’s really cool after making progress to be seeing your character run faster or jump higher because you’ve worked at it. My only issue with it is that there’s no way to redistribute skill points you’ve spent. I would have liked to be able to explore other options before sticking with them, for example, whether or not it is more effective to put more points into jumping or acceleration.

The biggest problem however is how the game performs graphically. I have been playing it on a machine that does a good job of playing brand new games at a good framerate. This game doesn’t even look as detailed as some that have ran well at 60 frames per second, and it regularly goes between 15-27 frames per second. For the most part that’s still playable, but it really could look better, and I can’t imagine the sickness people using VR Headsets would get (which this game does support).

There is also online multiplayer, but it really just feels like the single player with a chat-box and more people running around.

Hover: Revolt of Gamers has great potential, and if by the time it gets to full release there is a strong variety of content in it, then it would be wonderful. But as of this writing it’s lacking, and isn’t quite worth picking up unless you just want to throw a tip the developer’s way and wait for the game to feel a bit more complete.