Skate, VTuber, Skate

Endless runners get this weird but warranted expectation of being mobile time-killers good for a fun bite-sized 9:16 adrenaline rush that specifically want $99.99 out of your wallet for some unknown fucking reason. I saw someone recently on YouTube that spent $180 on Temple Run to hit 10,000m at World Record pace. Besides internet clout and crazy people looking to be the best on an app that gets automatically downloaded on your phone after a system update: there’s actually gotta be legs to making an endless runner fun and not financially predatory, yeah?

Of all places, Stardust Skate looks to piece together just that. Choose from a handful of VchiBan-licensed VTuber personalities and slam a two-button control scheme through another handful of stages that get progressively busier to end your run. You are given five lives that tick away at each collision with an object and many, many stars to collect. Jumping and slamming to the ground (your two button combo) provides a boost to your speed and can continue a multiplier to get you as many stars/points as possible. Slamming onto “bounceable” objects like umbrellas, beach balls, manholes pushed into the air by water, and various enemies careening towards you can also continue your multiplier.

This multiplier gives you not only stars, but progress to your character’s special move, which can be temporary invincibility, a no-charge-needed double jump, or an additional life. The game…doesn’t really tell you how to these special moves, but the double jump is self-explanatory and the extra life happens once the special meter is filled. Doing your invincibility move requires you to hit something when the meter is full, but seeing as you’re actively trying to avoid that made finding this out take an embarrassingly long time. When a stage completes, you’ll be given a rundown of the stage and your total run. If you grab all 4 big stars in a stage, you’ll be given an extra life, but you’ll only know if you hit them all when the stage is over.

Stages navigate you through the various backdrops of the VchiBan-branded Stardust Valley: city streets, sunset-bathed beaches, foggy cemeteries, and spacious farm lands. Each stage has 4 lanes to slide through, with some sections needing timed jumps to access. The early stages are pretty pedestrian to let you steady your legs, but once the stages start replaying, the increase in objects and dangers makes keeping a combo and your speed a pretty hard task to keep up without stumbling. Some stages have a late-stage knack of hiding incoming enemies and objects behind elevated lanes that feels a little gifting to the game trying to kill your run, making losing your combo less a teaching moment and more of a sigh of annoyance.

When your run does end, complete with your character ragdolling through the air and a Polaroid snapshot to commemorate the spill, you’re given stars to then spend on the Gacha machine back in menu area-AHA gotchu Bitch, you may not spend actual money after buying this game but you’re gonna feel the wrath of luck-based incentives to keep those runs coming! Each spin is 1,500 stars, where runs will usually net you about 1-2 spins worth of currency. When you crank the knob to receive your prize, you’re hoping to receive one of 53 skateboard, with the rarest ones providing extra special moves to your character. But the big word in that previous sentence is “hoping,” as the Gacha machine is filled with a buncha trash you don’t want, and I mean a bunch of trash. Multiple times I got 5-6 consecutive pulls of trash, effectively negating a good run of a cool reward to cap off the experience. Yeah it’s luck-based when all is said and done, but the Gacha does more harm than good in my eyes.

But man, for what it provides you for the price it’s asking for (and likely to go on sale for even cheaper in later months), it’s hard to say no to give it a spin and see what it’s got going. I had some locked-in moments that really pulled me into the gameplay loop and the characters are all fun to play, ShiaBun’s crashout soundbite had me fucking losing it, but your mileage may vary on the reward system after the run is over and how far 4 stages on repeat will get you. I’ll definitely pop it on every now and then and see if I can collect everything, but given my luck with Gacha, it may be a slow completion.

Stupid trash rolls.

6/10