Oh my god, that was awful.

I bought this on impulse during the Steam sale because I thought the graphical style looked pretty cool. It advertises itself as an endless runner with an Ikaruga color-switching mechanic. I thought, what could go wrong?

The controls. The physics. The visuals. It was a nightmare.

For starters, this game has absolutely no edge physics. None. For the unfamiliar, "edge physics" are a feature of just about every highly-rated sidescrolling platformer in the history of games, which gives you a few frames' window of opportunity to jump after walking off the edge of a cliff -- kind of like a tiny midair jump that feels like you're propelling yourself off the edge of the cliff. Mario does it, Sonic does it, every platformer character I can think of off the top of my head does it... but not this game. Here, upon stepping on the edge of a cliff, your character will immediately just slide off. This actually makes the game impossible at higher speeds, because if you get a bad combination of landscapes, it's possible to just trip down a bunch of stairs and into a pit with no way to save yourself.

There are only about 7 terrain shapes in the game which are just repeated in different orders ad nauseam. Certain combinations of terrain will make it impossible to grab pickups. Other combinations will make it impossible to grab a pickup without also jumping into a pit. As you speed up, certain combinations of terrain become outright impossible to survive. If you're going for a high score, you'd better just pray you don't get any unsolvable terrain.

The game makes you hold down the jump key to prolong your jump, yet it doesn't check to see if you've released the key and pressed again before making you jump again. This means you'll frequently bunny-hop to your doom if you're not careful.

The fire and ice switching is only useful for avoiding two kinds of death obstacles and picking up two kinds of powerups. That’s it. There are no other game mechanics.

The visual style, which is probably the best part of the game, is also a detriment. The ice pickups, as well as the ice character, have no contrast or outline, and are practically invisible on the game's bright-colored backgrounds. The scrolling terrain constantly stutters in a headache-inducing way.

And the music is one 60-second loop that plays during menus and gameplay. Over. And over. And over.

You will almost never hear me say this, but stay away from this game, even if you’re an achievement hunter. I know you can fully complete it in about three hours, but with the infuriating edge physics and the luck factor, it’s just not worth the emotional abuse. Please. Just trust me on this one. This game is torture, and I suffered through it so that you don’t have to.

And I want my three hours back.

Spirit Run is an endless runner a bit like Temple Run but from the side on viewpoint. It's not too bad a game, I could recommend it if you like games like Temple Run, but really just nothing that great about it. Graphics are very basic stuff, gameplay can get a bit frustrating with deaths that couldn't really be avoided. Its just about OK, but not good enough to recommend, just too simple.

Spirit Run - Fire vs. Ice feels like a straight mobile port. There is no exit button, no volume mixer, and no in-game keybind options. It's possible to rebind the keys with the Unity launcher but there is still limited controller support. Steam overlay reports the frame-rate as 60fps but it's obviously lower. Either a lower frame-rate has been hard-coded into the game for mobile systems or the game wasn't optimised. This becomes obvious as the initial loading screen takes far too long for what the game offers, which isn't much more than a bare-bones endless runner.

This is a very funny game to play against your friends. I would recommend to play it on the couch and take turns. The price is a bit high, but as long as it's on sale you can safely buy it. It can be frustrating when a multiplier is misplaced, and you can't easily reach it.

As for the controller support: When you are prompted to select the game configuration, go to the 'Input' tab. You can change the controls of the game, and make controller input possible.

I highly recommend this game. Very fun and easy to pickup. However, whilst progressing at higher speeds I've noticed that some patterns of the multipliers just make it literally impossible to get all of them, thus losing your whole multiplier (you will only be affected by this if you're pushing for top 3).

If anyone who made this game sees this I'd be happy to record some gameplay and point out which patterns I think need to be changed OR you could maybe make missing one multiplier more forgiving, for example, instead of losing the whole multiplier, just cut the multiplier in half from say 50 to 25 instead of just straight to 0.

Game claims to have "full controller support" and has ZERO controller support. Big turn-off. Acually, you can manually go and re-bind your controller buttons onto the inputs on the keyboard through the launcher, takes a few minutes but it is possible. However, this is not "full controller support", I would barely even call it "partial" support.

Then when you actually go to rebind your keys you realize there are only 3 buttons: jump, switch fire/ice, and slide. You hardly even need a controller since you can't even move your character freely. That's not a huge issue, though, the game was designed in a certain way that does not require movement. You just walk along with the world. Does the world ever speed up? It seems so slow it's boring. More like the "walk" of your life. Sure you need time to think about what to do, and slower = easier, and it probably gets faster and/or more difficult later on, but initially it comes across as pretty lame. Imagine Super Mario Bros except you have someone else holding down the button to walk and it is your job to jump. I would much rather have the ability to RUN, like actually FAST, but the screen moved at a minimum pace, and was rewarded for running faster than the game wanted to go. Having very little control over what is going on is a turn-off, definitely. It becomes a game of rock-paper-scissors very quickly.

Sometimes, though you can get a really really bad game and it is still enjoyable if the leaderboard is up to par. This way you can show off your achievements of torture. Does this game have a good leaderboard? NO! It barely has one. What I would have liked to see is this:

- see your rank globally
- see your rank among your friends
- browse through all the users' scores freely

Instead, we are given a list of the top 10 scores in the world. If you are not in the top 10, you don't appear ANYWHERE. Oh, and those scores are super high already, on the first day, so basically forget they even exist (and since this is a simple game, expect them to be hacked pretty quick).

So the leaderboards are basically non-existant, the gameplay sucks, the controller support is a lie, did I miss anything? I'm not even going to go over the empty steam repository issue yesterday, mistakes happen. Is the game worth $2? Hm. Sort of. If it were a bit more polished maybe. Give it a few months for the developer to fix all of these problems. You won't miss much!

Well I am going down the way.
Basically there is just RNG map generator which will tell you if you can succeed or fail in leaderboards. There is not many things you can change as a player, just repeat, repeat, repeat and once a while you will get a good map you can beat your record.
You basically can't master this game as it is not up to your skills, but just about luck where you will find bonus boosters as you need to catch a lot of them in a row (no, you can't miss any as it resets your booster back to zero) which is clearly impossible in some desks in higher speed... and in high speed you can't jump fast enough to go through map so there is just 1 chance in every single map...
It is not that hard to clear all achievements, but it will take a bunch of time (yeah, 10000 jumps and if you are lack of luck then 100000 score - btw in game there is just about 80 players beating that score in leaderboards).

Here it is, another game for your "I wish I didn't own this" folder.

Heck, this isn't even a game, it's like a free demo for a game; except you have to pay for the demo and the game doesn't exist.

A woeful infinite runner that "randomly" generates levels from the same sparse collection of scenery building blocks, Fire vs. Ice is without any redeeming features whatsoever. It looks bad, the controls are unresponsive, leading to many otherwise avoidable deaths, and the same half-a-minute of DOS-era music loops over and over. I would rather I never started.

Oh, and it's made in Unity. Because of course it is.

Avoid!

Received this as a gift. Catchy music and the fire/ice elemental switching is interesting but nothing else really makes this endless runner stand out. I would not recommend.

Nice little game for people who love challenge !