Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield shows you the entire game within the first 30 seconds. Whether or not that’s a good or bad thing will depend entirely upon your fondness of the endless runner genre. For all it’s style, Aerial_Knight’s doesn’t do anything different from every other endless runner gameplay wise. The main character Wally, moves on his own, all you control is jumping, sliding and dashing. If this style of game isn’t your thing, Aerial_Knight’s won’t be the one to convince you otherwise but it’s art style and soundtrack will certainly make a compelling case.
Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield takes place in a futuristic, cyberpunk style Detroit. The game centers on Wally, who discovers an object that could change the city forever and gets chased by authorities who want to stop him. From here, the player controls his jumps and slides to avoid obstacles while he moves on his own. It’s all very straightforward, you slide under things, you use the high jump to leap tall obstacles and the low jump to hop small ones. There’s also a dash button that will increase your speed and smash through certain obstacles as well. Everything is mapped to the d-pad as well as the face buttons so you can chose which hand you’d like to play with or you can use a combination of both.
There’s three difficulties to play on. Normal, Hard and Insane. In normal mode the game goes into slow motion before an obstacle to help you out. Obstacles are also color coated to which input should be used to avoid them. Hard mode is the same but shortens the slow motion window. Insane takes away the color coating, the slow motion and adds in new obstacles as well. People looking for a challenge should play on Insane from the get go.
In total, the game has 13 levels. There are unlockable outfits but they’re pretty hard to miss on your first playthrough and Wally moves so quick you won’t really be noticing what he wears anyway. There’s no other modes to speak of. No endless mode, no time trial, not even online leaderboards. So once you beat it, the only reason to play again is to try and beat your own time on the levels. You’ll beat it very fast as well. The game can be beaten in about 90 minutes depending on how fast you are and how much you die.
While there are some interesting deviations from the standard gameplay formula, like a level that runs in reverse and one where you run up instead of to the side, most of the game plays the same. Normally I would say that’s a negative but the game is over so fast, it’s hard to notice. What you will notice is some obstacles get reused a lot. You’ll be jumping the same fence quite a bit.
The visual style is cel-shaded with a hint of neon. It looks fantastic, like an afro-futurist comic book come to life and fits the style of the game well. The best thing in the game is the soundtrack. This is one of the best game soundtracks I’ve heard in a while. Every track is a banger that you will be bobbing your head to and it really proves the effect good music has on a game because this soundtrack will make you want to keep playing. I kept playing simply because I wanted to keep listening to the songs. The best way I can describe the music in the game is Hip-Hop Smooth Jazz and it’s all an absolute groove and makes everything in the game that much cooler by association.
So what are you getting with Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield? Well you’re getting a super stylish game with slightly repetitive gameplay, not much replay value and one of the best soundtracks you’ll ever hear. It’s only $12USD/$16CAD and it’s a nice portable game on Switch but it’s lack of any replay value makes it really hard to recommend even for the current price which is a shame because I enjoyed my time with it, I just wish it gave me a reason to keep playing past those 13 levels. If you like endless runners then I say you should download the free demo and get if it ever goes on sale. If you don’t like endless runners, this won’t be the one that convinces you. What I will recommend everyone do is add the soundtrack to your playlist because it absolutely slaps.
Aerial Knight’s Never Yield is available now for Nintendo Switch(reviewed), PS4, PS5, Xbox and PC
Rating: A 10K Run Towards Paddington
This review used our old rating system, The Paddington Scale. To learn more please read this post
Rongo 