8 maps
12 characters
A short and terrible campaign
Visual clarity could not be worse
There's not one reason to pick this up over the original Speedrunners. It's not even an early access game, it just has no content. Play the original.

First off I'd like to start this review with some highlights of the Agreement you sign in the beginning.

EULA License Grant for the Game. We grant you a non-exclusive, personal, revocable, non-transferable license to download, install, and use the Game for your personal, non-commercial use on devices or console you own or control, provided they meet the necessary specifications. You agree that your use of the Game is solely for personal entertainment and has no monetary value.

Restrictions & Community Guidelines

You agree not to:
iv. Reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, display, perform, prepare derivative works base on, or modify the Game, in whole or in part, except as permitted by applicable law;

This Means that: you are agreeing that you purchased a revokable license rather than own the game.
And you are not allowed to modify or reverse engineer the files.

Lets say in 5 years they pull online capabilities from this game and the community decides to engineer a new community version of online for people to still play. They can pull it down.

The community decides they miss custom maps from 1 and wants to bring custom maps into 2? Not anymore. And if they catch you doing such things? They can happily pull your "revokable license"

This game is essentially Fair Play Labs taking the corpse of DoubleDutch Games Speedrunners 1 and puppeting it to be a fraction of what it once was.

The big new highlight they showcase is the new graphics design. But when you start playing you notice the removal of the minimalist design quickly makes you start to lose track of where you are at points in time.

Anyone from the pc release of Speedrunners 1 will remember the community support given with the allowance of Community made maps. This is no-longer a thing. To top it off back to the first highlight they allow absolutely no modification to these files what-so-ever. If this was because they made one version of the game for both consoles and pc and decided they do not want to spend anymore time to developed extra's for pc like custom maps (which the last dev's did) that could then been published to be downloaded on consoles as well? Any reason why is up for speculation.

The story mode.
I beat the story mode while reading the dialogue in-between races in under 30 minutes.
There are three chapters to the story mode. At the end of every chapter there is a boss battle.
There are two boss battles where the boss is essentially a GIF on the top right of a side-scroller map and one where it's a gif in the middle of an arena. Your objective is to get item crates and shoot rockets at a 45 degree to where you're facing because they designed it to where it cannot home in on the GIF. The bosses have very simple rotating attack patterns as well.

There where two styles of races in the campaign.
1. The generic race till the other guys fall out of the screen we all grown to love
2. You and the others race laps and 1st place is the winner.

During the second style of races I have to say your personal camera given is absolutely atrocious zoomed in as close as it could possibly be to your runner not allowing for you to see any of your play space. In the game settings you can adjust it from small to large but it barely does any difference giving you a tiny bit more camera in front, and above you.

During the gameplay you will encounter random hitches/stutters even though this game is rather simplistic and you'd assume can't be resource intensive.

Online-play:
I still had fun in online. But I think a portion of that was rose-tinted glasses. I was absolutely joyful to be back in speedrunners with a populated community.

One problem though is the items. Unlike the first game there is a noticeable delay during the deployment of items to where there hurtboxes actually register. This allows for other players/npcs to run straight through a crate or projectile during its deployment if they are close enough to you.

The online play can be pretty laggy and have missed inputs or notable delay.

If everyone else quits the race the match does not count! No XP.

Lack of levels from the first game. and very few levels as is.

There seems to be adjustments to the gravity changing pathing higher level players would take.

Given all this I have critiqued I will still be playing the game and not refunding it. It's only $10 USD for me to relive some fond memories with a community I have since long-missed. I'm still beaten up by the lack of community representation by the developers and do not like their choice in camera and graphic design but hey. New supported game. Given all the negatives I will still be giving a thumbs down.

Why would i buy a "sequel" game with the same maps and characters, but slower and harder to read.