Rush review

At the top of the App Store charts at the time of my downloading, Rush is a game that should be wonderfully simplistic but isn’t. In the game, you pilot a sphere that must switch lanes at a fast pace to avoid imposing wedges that stand in your path, like every nightmare you’ve ever had about driving on the interstate. You earn one point for every wedge that you pass unscathed. If you accidentally hit a roadblock, you explode and you have to start over. For a thirty-second video, you can often revive if you’re close to a goal.

Rush has a futuristic sci-fi aesthetic, a sphere and road that changes color continuously. While this makes for visually pleasing gameplay, it has a fluorescent quality that can be distracting and can add more frustration to the already unsteady, anxious nature of the game. This game would definitely benefit from an option to make the track one solid color. Although the game is good about not having annoying ads after every single level, there is a consistent banner ad at the bottom during gameplay. It was a bit difficult to immerse myself in the game’s atmosphere with an ad for allergy medication prominently displayed at the bottom. There is no paid, ad-free version of Rush, at least not one that is accessible in the game.

Rush’s strong points are its customizability and its unique presentation of statistics. For a certain number of gems (collected in-game and through daily gifts), you can purchase a different random sphere, of which there are fifty, and when you level up you earn a different style of track. Both can be interchanged at any time. Challenges keep the player on their toes, and with a hundred different ones to complete, it will be some time before Rush becomes stale. What was most delightful to me about Rush was its statistical focus, keeping track of your all-time high score, daily high score, and average score, informing you in-game when you surpass any of these. A stats page keeps track of your rank, your challenge progress, how much content you’ve unlocked, and charts that show you your average score over time.

All in all, even though there were unique aspects to the game that kept it from becoming stagnant, the frantic gameplay of Rush was not to my taste, and though it may be appropriate for players who don’t easily get frustrated with games, it wasn’t for me.