Recent reviews by Dennet

Jet Set Radio this isn't, but this is by no means a bad thing.

Hover is a good game - for an indie development studio, I would say even very good. Don't come in expecting million-dollar budget triple-A flashiness and mechanical depth of the Mariana Trench. What you get, however, is a well-polished and solid mechanic for getting around town at blazing speed. The moveset isn't by all means terribly complicated or convoluted, in fact I would actually call it simple - but in that simplicity it just feels natural, in a way, to zip around the open world areas. For what reason? No big reason, it's just that fun to lose yourself to your own personal pathfinding.

In a way, Hover's all about that. Unlike the game that inspired it, the core gameplay loop of this game is the rapid movement and pathfinding. Nearly all things to do revolve around getting from point A to point B in the most efficient (or least efficient and most fabulous) way possible, sometimes carrying something with you. Of course, there are various collectibles, a ton of them in fact, but their relevance is just that - optional. Spraying graffiti will be something done in the spur of the moment rather than your primary objective.

Hover is also hard. As you level up and gather essentially "mods" that increase your various stats in different ways (faster movement speed, higher jumps, less sliding friction, etc.), you can optimize yourself for various challenges the game throws at you, but even then earning those silver and gold medals (or simple and shiny, as the game calls them) is nothing to scoff at. You'll find yourself restarting a race plenty of times to nail down the timing to the utmost just to make ends meet and get to the finish line at the last three seconds to spare. Or maybe you'll find another route alltogether? Many challenges are set in the open world with loose frequency of checkpoints, letting you scuttle around alternate paths at your leisure.

To sum up, I recommend this game. It's not JSR, don't expect it to be JSR - but in the modern time, so far, it's the next best thing. Hover is a solid, interesting game that manages to charm people with its varied level design and the plethora of ways to get around.

Perhaps the game isn't the most engaging in a day-to-day format (as it's mostly nothing but repeated grind for resrouces to get weapons to grind resources to... you get the idea), but dropping in every once in a while, it's great fun. The world crafted is also very interesting, and the scant amount of information revealed has me gripped by the **** to come back every now and again and see where the story goes.

(Yes, the game does have a story.)