The music’s quite nice though.
Free to play (offers in app purchases)
I suspect this is one we’ll be coming back to at a later date, thanks to Daniel for pointing this out to us. It’s the official Run For Money app (in English!), you too can try and outrun the Hunters.
Or at least you can when it’s working, this morning I got a few games in and it keeps hanging on Executing Task Queue. Consider this more of a first impressions thing than a fully blown review.
Still what I did manage to play is nicely presented, you get a bit of backstory (you take a phone call from the future asking if you want to participate, yadda yadda) and it’s straight onto the first game, a training one where it teaches you the controls – you use both thumbs, one to control where you run, one to control the camera. It doesn’t work too-o-o badly as on-screen joypads go, but it’s rather more difficult on an iPad than it would be on an iPhone I imagine.
It basically features everything you’d expect from the show – you can do missions (with consequences for success or failure) and pick up and use items and look at your phone to get an overview of the areas – modelled loosely on the places they film in real life. Outrunning the Hunters is quite tough but there are usually enough corners to break line-of-sight, and the screen turns a bit red if you’re approaching a dangerous area. There are hiding places, but I think these could have done with being a bit better signposted (in the training level it shows you can hide in a bin, it wasn’t until much later I discovered by accident you can hide in the back of a truck). You will doubtless spend most of the time wandering around like a headless chicken – this is probably not far off what it’s like to participate in the actual show although I’m not quite convinced it makes for a perfect mobile and tablet experience.
The games I managed to play ran for three minutes and you earn two types of in-game currency – Luna (which you’ll win if you survive the games or surrender) and Terra (which you can use to buy yourself back into a game if you get caught). You can swap 100,000 Luna for 1 Terra, which would involve winning 5-6 games to build up, or you can pay Actual Real Cash. You can also buy clothes and items which help your character, and you can spend currency to win items in a lottery (or you can enter for free once a day). The game seems plenty playable without having to spend any real world money.
Presentation wise there’s lots to love about the app, but right now it feels too buggy and a bit too difficult. But both of these things might get better, and it’s free to play so you can try for yourself.
Edit: It’s working properly for me now. A few things not apparent in the text:
- The three-minute challenge levels are free to play, but the actual larger Runs for Money cost Luna. On the plus side, you can play the one in Shibya – 8 minutes long, 24,000 prize, for free, and without risk of losing accumulated money throughout.
- You can buy Terra straight from the shop, but crucially and rather naughtily it doesn’t tell you the price, on iOS anyway. Maybe they’re currently free, maybe they’re £50 a pop, I haven’t dared try. Just be aware!