SpeedX 3D: Hyper Edition

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

SpeedX 3D: Hyper Edition is an Arcade-style game released on Nintendo 3DS in 2013, and the follow-up to the prior year’s SpeedX 3D. As with the prior game, the premise in this game is pretty simple – the player is constantly moving forward in the first-person perspective, and must try to avoid obstacles. In fact, this game is so similar, I’m just going to be copying what I wrote in my review of the earlier game, only changing what’s different this time around.

The presentation here is pretty good for a $3 game, using polygonal 3D graphics depicting a cylindrical corridor that twists and turns, and warps to be a flat plane or even turn inside-out as you speed forward on it, with obstructions taking the form of cubes, columns, and pyramids. I should note that when the corridor warps so you’re no longer enclosed within it, you can see some pretty noticeable pop-in, and there’s some occasional slowdown as well, though not enough to significantly interfere with the gameplay. On the other hand, this game frequently changes the lighting in some fun ways that can make things pretty visually interesting, and enabling the new Hyper mode gives you a great sense of speed. This is all backed by a decent techno-style soundtrack.

As for the gameplay… well, this is a pretty simple, straightforward game. Just dodge left or right using the circle pad (or gyroscopic motion control, but this method of control is pretty bad), look for patches that can give you a shield to survive more minor collisions, and otherwise just try to avoid everything as best you can. The game does try to shake things up every now and then by adding new types of obstacles, as well as effects that mess with your visuals or controls, but otherwise this is just… well, a simple game.

There are some noteworthy changes in this release that make it differ from the prior game. Firstly, this release drops all of the different game modes in favor of just presenting players with an endless game, a cut that doesn’t really bother me that much – the different game modes didn’t do much for me in the prior game anyway. In addition, there’s a new ability to freely change the game’s music with the L and R buttons. However, probably the biggest change is the addition of a hyper button, which drastically increases your speed while you press it, also adding to your score. This, in addition to an increase in the early-game difficulty (as opposed to the snoozefest of the early parts of the previous game) make this a much better game than SpeedX 3D, although it’s still a fairly simple game.

Oh, and just to sweeten the deal, this game is a whole $1 cheaper. So is SpeedX 3D: Hyper Edition worth that $3? Well, as I said, this is a pretty simple game, but the great sense of speed and the improvements made to the difficulty curve make this much more entertaining than the prior game, and with such a low price tag, it’s a bit easier to see that $3 as worthwhile for a decent time-waster.

tl;dr – SpeedX 3D: Hyper Edition is an Arcade-style game where the player is constantly moving forward in the first-person perspective in a twisting corridor, and must try to avoid obstacles. This game makes tweaks to the prior game’s difficulty curve, and adds a nice new “Hyper” button in place of the interchangeable game modes of the prior game. On balance, this is a solid improvement that makes this a much better game, and the even nicer price of $3 makes this a pretty decent time-waster to play for a few minutes at a time.

Grade: C+

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