Risky Road Review

Indie Elegance

Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but all these open-world games like The Division and Assassin’s Creed are getting more and more off-putting. This is no doubt mostly due to massive maps full of boring activities (or maybe I’m just sick of Ubisoft). These days, I much prefer simpler games that don’t require twenty hours of slogging through a checklist of tasks, such as Overwatch and Rocket League. The point I’m making here is that fun simplicity usually trumps dull complexity. Luckily for Risky Road, it’s one of the simplest games I’ve ever played.

Ketchapp’s Risky Road is an Android action game that puts you in control of a truck tasked with protecting a golden egg. As with games like Trials Evolution and Snuggle Truck, you control yourself by accelerating and decelerating. Risky Road is actually very similar to Snuggle Truck. In both games you have to pay attention to not only the physics of your vehicle, but also what’s inside of it. As you can imagine, the egg doesn’t have a seat belt on, so every little bump in the road may result in an omelet.

Risky, You Say?

As you drive through each level, you’ll pass through checkpoints, but only the egg matters. If you lose the egg on a big jump, but your truck makes it to a checkpoint, it doesn’t count. However, this also means that, if your truck take a tumble and catapults the egg forward, Risky Road will give you credit for that checkpoint up ahead. Whether this is annoying or not depends entirely on the player, but I personally find it pretty amusing.

Risky Road’s art style borders on being bland, but I kind of like it. The simple colors and designs make it easy to keep track of everything. However, I will fault the game for being bland in its level choices. While the levels are randomized, I can only remember playing in a tundra or in Egypt. I can only look at sand and snow for so long before it gets old. The backgrounds don’t really affect gameplay, but they would’ve really benefited from more varied environments.

Speaking of randomized levels, this is Risky Road’s double-edged sword. On one hand, having each level be completely randomized gives you endless variety and prevents the game from getting boring too quickly. On the other hand, the levels being randomized means that you can never perfect them. Part of the enjoyment from games like Trials Fusion comes from repeating a difficult section over and over again in hopes of perfecting your speed and angle.

Conclusion

You won’t get that kind of encouragement for perfectionism in Risky Road. What you will get are quick spawns and random levels, which make it pretty hard to stay mad for too long. Ketchapp didn’t try to reinvent the wheel with this game. And they didn’t give you 400 side missions to complete. What they tried to do was create a simple game that you can have tons of fun with. There’s not much too this game, but that also means that there’s not much wrong with this game. Well, except how long it takes to unlock skins, but you can just ignore them to focus on the risky road ahead.