SpeedRunners

The concept is a simple one; players control a pint-sized superhero and run laps around 2D levels, dodging obstacles and - wherever possible - taking out their opponents and leaving them in the dust.

It gets a little more complicated, but that's the gist of it. Run fast, dodge hard, time your trickery for maximum impact.

It's still far from the finished article. It's an improved and enlarged version of Speedrunner HD, which was released a couple of years ago, for free on PC and for money on XBLIG. Revised and revamped, SpeedRunners is currently in Early Access on Steam, so the game is undergoing constant iteration, with new features added regularly. But, what's already there is good fun. It sports the kind of gameplay that'll get your pulse racing, and there's a whole heap of personality in there that should keep you coming back for more, especially if you've got friends who've also got the game.

Up to four players take part in every round (if you can't make up the numbers from your friends list, you can open up your game to the public, or fill spaces with bots), each assuming the role of a tongue-in-cheek superhero. What follows is a mix of racing, parkour, and multiplayer hijinks that reminds us of Mario Kart in its prime - albeit from a different perspective. The four heroes run hell for leather through the terrain, leaping over obstacles, sliding under ledges, gliding through speed boosts, and using their grappling hooks to swing from ceilings.

Importantly, the netcode seems to be really robust, and issues with lag are/were very rare. It means SpeedRunners offers both solid local and online experiences; something that the developers have been keen to do since the beginning. DoubleDutch's Casper van Est explained to us what they were hoping to achieve with the game. "What we wanted to do with SpeedRunners is take the fun and rivalry of local multiplayer games and bring that experience online, so you can also play that type of game against your friends who for some reason are unable to come over to your house."

We then got a whistle-stop tour of the game's influences. "I remember having a blast playing Mashed (a spiritual successor to Micro Machines) at my dorm room," van Est said, "and I wanted to be able to play such a game against the same group of friends, even though we now live in different cities. So we're definitely influenced by local multiplayer racing games such as Micro Machines, Mario Kart, Ignition and Mashed, where there's plenty of opportunities to mess with your friends, only to reconcile after the game is over."

That competitive edge is present and accounted for, and I can attest to that. There's nothing more disappointing than coming second behind GRTV's Dóri Halldórsson because he's pulled off a well-timed manoeuvre and left me for dust. A game is won when one player has managed to achieve three individual victories on the same course. Four players start each race, but as soon as one lags so far behind as to drop out of view of the first placed racer, they're out and a explosion rings the screen and the window starts to get smaller, making it increasingly harder to keep up.

It's a well-worked mechanic, and it ensures that races don't last forever. Once the screen has shrunk to a certain size, the race continues until one runner makes a mistake. When it gets to this stage, there's no room for error. The first-to-three system offers instant bragging rights if you win a round. You might not win the war, but you've still got a great chance of winning one or two battles along the way.

Where it gets really interesting is in the powers and boosts that you can pick up, and the way that the heroes move. Pickups range from simple boxes that you drop to trip over players running in your wake, to spinning drill attacks that take out your opponents, slowing them down as you charge ahead. My personal favourite is the grapple gun, similar to the one equipped as standard, but instead used to grab hold of a frontrunner, flinging you forward and them backwards simultaneously. Careful and deliberate use of this trick can be enough to save you from plummeting to death, it can win you a round, or it can even consign an opponent to their doom.

There's loads of options at any given moment, and fluent control and fast reactions are essential to survival and success. There's slides, double jumps, wall jumps, shortcuts, environmental hazards and more. Getting mastery of all of the different moves, and knowing when to use them, can make all the difference.

Mechanically it's sound, but there's still more improvements to come in other areas. "We're currently planning to add one or two "big" features like mid-game joining and leaderboards/ranking and then calling it "finished", but our plans tend to change on a monthly basis," van Est told us. These features will follow the Origins single-player mode that we've not even mentioned here, and the recently added level editor. There's a couple of other things we'd like to see, such as more heroes to choose from and more approved maps (there's a current flood of new, player-generated courses - bringing the best content to the main client instead of having to trawl through the Steam Workshop would be good), but all told - considering the game's pricing - we're really happy with the package as it is and we like the direction of where it's headed.

Speaking of where it's headed, we asked if there were plans to bring the game to console. It plays fine on our PC, online via Steam, but this one's ripe for the console market and the couch multiplayer that comes with it. We're actually surprised that, given the recent push to hoover up the best upcoming indie titles, none of the major platform holders have approached DoubleDutch about a potential port.

"We'd like our game to come out on consoles at some point," we were told, "as we think a game like SpeedRunners is enjoyed best with your friends on a couch. However, we don't have any concrete plans at the moment in this direction; we're fully focused on finalising the game for PC. After that, we'll take a look at ports (Mac, Linux) and see what's possible on consoles. But we're definitely open to a console port (so if anyone from MS or Sony is reading this, hit us up!)."

There's still more to come from SpeedRunners, but it's shaping up rather nicely. It's a competitive game, but accessible and easy to learn. The more content it launches with the better; more heroes, more levels, and more tricks/powers (though perhaps not many of the latter, as it's nicely balanced as it is) would benefit the game's chances when it's outside of the iterative nest that is Steam Early Access. If thinking back to the days of sending friends spinning out of races with well-placed banana skins in Mario Kart fills you with a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, make sure you check out SpeedRunners, it's built of the same stuff.