Caltrops - Gamerasutra

Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

by Mischief Maker 09/18/2018, 8:55pm PDT

I feel like I'm an out-of-touch mother telling her goth daughter how much prettier she'd look if she wore something other than black all the time.

Distance is the sequel to Nitronic Rush, one of the prettiest freeware games of all time. You drive a futuristic jet car with magnetic wheels and the ability to fly through a convoluted neon-soaked glass highway of a massive orbital space station. It's a weird hybrid of racing game and speed run platformer, as the tracks are actively trying to kill you. Obstacles pop out of the ground, lasers slice half your wheels off, and the track itself constantly requires you to leap from driving on the floor to driving on the ceiling in a splitsecond. Fortunately your car has side thrusters that you can use to spin yourself mid-air, and Distance adds a fifth thruster that pushes your car firmly into the ground, making wall jumps considerably less difficult than in Nitronic Rush. The sense of speed and danger is exhilarating, at least the first time you play a track.

The one problem I have with the game is the aesthetic of the main campaign. The designer became enamored with experimenting with making a racing game/horror hybrid, and the main campaign is the result. It starts out beautiful, but as the horror elements pile on the game becomes less and less colorful and the visual sparkle that's one of the main draws of the game becomes less and less. Fortunately after the main campaign's done (in about 2 hours give or take) you get a second campaign unlocked that's an actual sequel to Nitronic Rush taking place in the same virtual city and it is drop dead gorgeous in this new engine with all the blazing colors on full display. And then you have over 100 individual maps in the aftergame arcade mode with wildly different looks.

Distance is a keeper. It's an improvement over Nitronic Rush in every way and one hell of a rush to try to survive. Recommended!