YES

Classic racing, a bot over priced. Get it on sale.

TLDR; If this game did not have the second campaign, this would have been a positive review.

This game has 3 campaigns. The first one, "Adventure," is the best one: well balanced difficulty and the longest in terms of number levels. The second, "Lost to Echoes," is the worst: terrible difficulty spike, making it the longest in terms of time to beat. The third campaign, "Nexus," was somewhere in the middle: the shortest in both level count and time to beat and only a bit more difficult than the first campaign.

The first campaign introduced each mechanic in a (mostly) intuitive manner and was, more or less, easy to beat. There were only 1 or 2 places where I got stuck for longer than a minute.

The second campaign was so much more difficult that it felt like the dark souls of racing games! I beat this game in around 2 hours. HALF of it was in Lost to Echoes alone. There are 2 main reasons for this: 1) you are punished for going fast and 2) there are an unreasonable number of 180 wall rides.

In a racing game, you want to go as fast as possible. For the most part, Distance embraces this: although the booster overheats if you use it too much, the heat resets to 0 whenever you hit a checkpoint, meaning you almost never need to let go of boost. There is even a speedrunning mode. The second campaign completely disregards that ideology: the path between some obstacles are so tight that you need to almost slow down to a complete stop, and there are numerous speed traps scattered throughout the levels in the form of doubled-up jump walls.

And the stunts are consistently bad. The most common type of stunt mechanic in the game is the directional thrusters, which allows you to roll your car as well as thrust downward to get extra grip. The first and third campaigns use this mechanic very well, and I rarely got stuck for more than a few retries whenever I had to spin my car to drive on some wall or ceiling multiple times in a row. However, the Lost to Echoes made extensive use of an advanced thruster stunt I call a "180 wall ride." Effectively, how it is supposed to work is that you begin a wall ride, jump off the wall, spin the car, and land on the other wall using the downward thruster. This sounds a lot easier to do than it is. In reality, how it ends up panning out is that you begin the wall ride, jump, spin around, and either lose all momentum halfway across OR gravity pulls your car too low to land on the other wall. Every single 180 wall ride took me around 5 minutes to get right. Sometimes, I didn't even manage to do it: I had to find a shortcut to bypass it entirely. And at one point, there were multiple in a row.

The worst part is that you need to unlock the campaigns in order, beating the first campaign to unlock the second, and the second to unlock the third. It's like being forced to beat Hard Mode in order to unlock Normal, after just completing Easy. The graphics are great, and the music is awesome, but the second campaign completely ruined my experience with the game.

I won this game in a free giveaway initially. I gave it a try not expecting much, and I was instantly hooked. To put it simply, it's Rocket League meets Thumper. I always thought that mixing racing with platforming elements was such a great idea, but unfortunately, there are almost no games in this niche. Yes, there’s Trackmania, and there are modes for different games like stunt race in GTA V and Super7 in Forza. Rocket League itself added racing (as a Fortnite mode) only recently. And this banger has been here all along for almost six years now.

Speaking of it, the gameplay is so satisfying and trance-inducing. The freedom this game provides is insane. In some levels, if you’re skilled enough, you can skip parts of the level by riding on the flipped side of the road. Zipping from walls to the ceiling, making stunts, and flying is so fun once you get the hang of it. It’s really hard to let go; this game definitely gives that "one more try" or "one more level" feeling. Boosting feels much weightier than in Rocket League, but flying, on the other hand, is really nimble and easy to control, with auto-orientation to the ground. Another fun aspect is the obstacles and car destruction. You can get sliced in any shape or form, losing wheels for example, and barely making it to the next checkpoint where you get fixed. Really fun stuff.

In terms of visuals and levels, it can be mixed. Some levels and their props can feel simpler than others, but some can be really awe-inspiring. Regardless, almost all of them can put you in a nice state of flow, where the only thing that matters is the closest obstacle and your reaction to it. There’s also an interesting adventure mode that tells you some story literally "on the fly" Definitely unique stuff.

One minor inconvenience is the controls. Both keyboard and gamepad default bindings are really weird. The good thing is you can simply change them by selecting a different preset (at least for a controller). However, all the button prompts are called weirdly like "Button 7" or "Yaw+" instead of showing actual gamepad icons. Again, a small thing, but you need to get used to it.

The important thing is that this game is a FULL PACKAGE. There’s story mode, many arcade levels with different playstyles, online and split-screen multiplayer, a random level generator, a level editor, workshop support, and even a VR mode. There will definitely be things for you to do. In our day and age, when games are released with the bare minimum amount of content and features, this is really commendable.

So if you like this kind of gameplay, give it a go, as there are really not that many alternatives, and this one is good. And I really hope there will be a Distance 2 someday, it deserves a sequel.

Peak gaming

This game left me with very mixed feelings. It has a unique visual style, theme, and soundtrack. Maybe even the story too. However, the clunky and sharp, sometimes even unresponsive controls, inconsistent, and unintuitive level design break the gameplay for me. The general idea of "learn, trial and error" was implemented very straightforwardly, without even explaining beforehand what to do when you need to act quickly. For example, in Act 9, you need to jump and fly from the road to the wall. I made at least 10 attempts before I could proceed further. It is like a platform game from the 80s and 90s, but with limited checkpoints, and you are always moving forward. The game gives you a boost and wings from the beginning, but in the middle of the first chapter, the game designers decide to take the wings from you, which makes Act 09 unnecessarily harder than other levels.

I made several attempts to jump into the game: played, disappointed, removed and then installed again. I saw many positive reviews on Steam, and maybe you will like the game too. But Distance is just not my cup of tea. I do not recommend it because of the reasons above, but I encourage you to try it because of the unique art style and theme.

Must have game, Play it with your own beloved music. Very unique experience.

The most important direction is forward. The most important skill is speed.

wish ppl still played this, it's everything it needs to be and more, just needs more gamemodes and colorful maps, the level design can be a bit drab.

very fun game can do lots of stuff best game ever!