Game Review: Fail Run (Mobile – Free to Play)

Guess who? Yep, it’s Voodoo again. With yet another free to play offering stuffed with excessive ads. Offering basic gameplay, basic rewards and basic fun with Fail Run. It’s Voodoo 101 and they stick solidly to type here.

The goal of the game is to get a character to walk forward and cross a finish line. Simple enough except the character has ragdoll physics so moving them forward is harder than you think. Touch the screen to move one foot then touch it again to move the other. Perfecting the ‘one foot in front of the other’ is the first real challenge and most will spend the first few levels watching the character fall face first, over and over again.

Eventually, how it plays becomes clear and making great strides to the finish line is easier than expected. So, to vary things up, levels start to introduce obstacles and more to make the short journey even more perilous. It can be quite fun, especially as the game sees any part of the body passing the finish line as a completion.

We can’t tell you how many levels we completed with just the tip of our character’s head over the line.

Of course, regardless of how many levels there are, this sort of gameplay has diminishing results and has next to no longevity. The only reason to keep playing after 15 minutes or so, is to unlock all the different outfits for the character. Though, of course, that has no bearing on gameplay at all.

The problems with Voodoo free to play games are rarely gameplay and credit to them, they at least try to vary up what their games involve. It’s just a shame they don’t take more time on making something with more substance instead of spamming the market with free to play offerings.

Which brings us to the biggest complaint about Fail Run… the ads. Good gods, Voodoo went overboard here. This is one of those games that sees you playing the game for longer than 30 seconds and says “hell no – here’s an ad”. Infuriating? More tiresome than anything else.

It’s not the worst thing Voodoo have released. That’s high praise!