LifeisXbox’s Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield review | When I first looked at Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield screenshots, I believed I was going to review a new platformer adventurer like Limbo or Inside. But as our Chief Editor said, ‘I couldn’t be more wrong.’ It’s time to run, and you better not stay too far behind!
This is a short review, our usual the good, mixed and the bad was difficult because of the nature of this game. Rafa played Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield for 3 hours on Xbox One X.
Developed by Neil Jones, a game artist and developer from Detroit whose studio goes by the name of Aerial_Knight too, Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield (or just AK, for short) is an auto-runner or endless runner game that, at a first look, reminded me of mobile games like Subway Surfer and its variants. Here you control Wally, a mysterious character out to recover items from his past, trying to save what’s left of the future. Run fast enough to outrun your enemies and expose the truth. Or at least to live long enough to see what happens.
According to Aerial Knight’s website, this game started as a passion project aiming to create something familiar and, at the same time, new for this generation of gamers. And I dare to say that you achieved what you wanted. The world in AK brings a futuristic Detroit stylized as a colorful Tokyo, with visual effects and elements in its scenery that create an incredible atmosphere. And this atmosphere only gets better when you add the music to it – and this, my friends, is the icing on the cake in this game.
Your adventure in AK will follow the beats of a mix between jazz, hip-hop, and classical music like I’ve never seen – or heard – before! And these compositions are just wonderful!! Its soundtrack was responsible for turning an auto-runner (for which I admit I was turning up the nose in the beginning) into an enjoyable experience!
Like in most – if not all – auto-runners, your gameplay in AK is straightforward: you press up to jump over blockages, down do slide under them, left to dodge obstacles, and right to sprint through barriers. Thankfully, you can use the d-pad, your analog stick, or your controller’s face buttons (A, B, X, and Y) for these inputs, helping in moments when the time between transitions is short. Each obstacle has a different color, helping you identify what command will be needed to overcome it. When playing at the normal level of difficulty, you count on a sharp slowdown before each obstacle that allows you to quickly identify the following command. This slowdown disappears on higher difficulty levels, and the number of obstacles increases, making your escape waaaay more challenging.
Now it’s time to tell you what I didn’t like about the game:
First, its interpretative story. Suppose I haven’t read the game’s description in Aerial Knight’s press kit or the Xbox store game description. In that case, I’d never had a clue about what’s happening in this game – and I could not guess it from its cutscenes. To be honest with you, they gave me a totally different idea about the game’s story.
Second, the repetitiveness in its level design. You will see levels that look the same, repeating entire segments in different chapters of the game. And what’s worse, repetition inside the same stage. There was a funny situation during a chapter: whenever Wally was going to cross a street, a police car stood in his way, and he turned left to run away from it. The problem is that he does it four times in a row, literally running around the block and returning to the initial point, with all the streets around the block looking precisely the same.
Finally, its duration. My initial gameplay took no longer than one and a half hour to complete it. The game has two more difficulty levels, but getting a better time doesn’t feel motivative enough for me – even though using new clothes on my character.
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With a history of gaming that goes from his old man’s Atari 2600 to his Xbox One, Rafael or RAF687, our Brazilian editor, has a love for games as old as he can remember. He has already spent countless hours in many consoles (Mega Drive/Genesis, Sega Saturn, PS1, PS2 and Xbox 360) and is always ready for more (as long as his wife is asleep). Raf has been writing for LifeisXbox since 2017, with a passion for games of almost all genres – though we know he has a special place in his heart for RPGs, racing games and anything that includes pixel art. Writing about games has always been a childhood dream to Raf, dream that he has fulfilled reviewing games for you here. You can drop him a message at Twitter, Facebook or Xbox Live at any time.
