Falling Elevator – Hyper Casual Demolish Escape Survival Game

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Falling Elevator – Hyper Casual Demolish Escape Survival Game, also referred to as simply Falling Elevator (the name I will use for the rest of this review) is a one-button Arcade-style game. It was released as an asset on the SellAnyCode Store in 2020 as Breaking Fall and released on Nintendo Switch in 2023 as a low-effort asset flip. So low-effort, in fact, that you can still see the original asset’s title, Breaking Fall, throughout this game. And embarrassingly, even though the original asset advertises that it comes with a level maker, this game only comes with the 50 levels originally made for the asset’s release.

The presentation in Falling Elevator isn’t bad, but it’s far from great. This game uses extremely simple 3D visuals to depict the elevator and its attached building surrounded by a few other buildings with some emergency vehicles at the ground level. These visuals are simple and amusing, but definitely seem like an amateurish effort. This is backed by a lighthearted acoustic guitar theme that fits the game’s lighthearted tone very well.

For the gameplay, the setup here is actually pretty ingenious. Players press the right trigger to put the brakes on a falling elevator attached to the outside of a building, holding it to halt your fall (but not completely stop it) and releasing it to start speeding down again. Using only this, players must avoid an obstacle course of contraptions on the way down.

Starting with this simple premise, I could see any number of interesting ways to make this progressively more interesting and more challenging. Perhaps some contraptions could bounce the elevator back up or shunt it onto a different track on either side, or perhaps you have to control multiple elevators at once, or maybe there’s even other things the brakes could affect, like sparks setting fires that burn away support structures or otherwise impassable traps. Maybe you can even build in a Music-Rhythm element into the action – certainly the Rhythm Heaven series has shown us that single-button Music-Rhythm games can be engaging. I don’t know, I’m just spitballing things off the top of my head here, just stuff I thought up in all of fifteen seconds that could have made this game more interesting than it actually is… but of course none of these things are in the game.

No, what you get instead are a series of obstacles that are mostly a cakewalk to get past – you just hold the breaks until they get out of your way. The exception to this is when two such obstacles are placed right next to each other, requiring precise timing from the player to get through both. As you can imagine, these moments make for massive difficulty spikes in a game that is otherwise absurdly easy.

Also, I’ll add that this game doesn’t allow you to select which level to play – you’re always stuck playing whatever level you last progressed to. There’s also no timer to push players to try to beat their old score – only a win/loss record, that’s it.

Look, I’ll admit that Falling Elevator certainly has potential as a fun but simple one-button Arcade-style game. Unfortunately, the level design does nothing to capitalize on that potential to make for a fun and challenging game, instead alternating between a game you can sleepwalk through and a game that you need to have perfect timing to progress through. There’s no creativity or cleverness in the level design, because these levels weren’t designed to be creative, clever, or even fun – they were designed as a demonstration for the asset buyer to use toward building their own levels. And whoever plopped Falling Elevator out on Nintendo Switch clearly had no intention to do anything more than the bare minimum to try to make a quick buck. Do yourself a favor and don’t be that quick buck.

tl;dr – Falling Elevator is a single-button Arcade-style game where players hold a button to put the brakes on a falling elevator to time it so the elevator can pass obstacles on the way down. This is a low-effort asset flip, with simple gameplay, terrible level design, and unimpressive visuals. Do not waste money on this game.

Grade: D

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