$1 Ride

​The premise of $1 Ride is that you are piloting a very cheap spaceship and need to pick up power-ups to progress through the level. You can unlock different ships and compete with yourself or other players to get the best time.

TL;DR at bottom

Gameplay –
As stated above, you are a ship travelling in one direction trying to pick up power-ups to gain speed by moving left and right in lanes.. Outside of that, there isn’t much else. You dodge asteroids and pick up money, which counts as your score. If you lose your speed, you get a game over. The lane sizes for the obstacles increases throughout the level, which provides some variation. The game is the same thing every time you play, albeit having randomized pickups and obstacles. It basically plays like any running game on a mobile device, which I think would be the best comparison to this game.

5/10

Graphics –
The graphics aren’t anything to be excited about. The UI is very unpolished and almost pixelated, and the ship doesn’t have any animation for moving left and right. However, it does have a smoke kind of animation on the exhaust from the ship, which is a nice touch. The visuals for the power-ups are not that impressive, but are easily distinguished. The fast movement of the stars and background of the level was causing me to feel nauseas after playing for a little bit. It got better, but I definitely felt a little sick while playing it.

4/10

Music /Audio –
There isn’t much to the soundtrack in the game. From what I can conclude, there is only one track that is repeated, which can get annoying. The sound effects are okay. Several of the power-ups do not have a sound when picked up. The menu sounds when navigating can become annoying if you are going back and forth through the menus very often for whatever reason. Nothing impressive.

5/10

Conclusion –
$1 Ride is not a revolutionary game. It is a very common game genre, massively occupying the mobile game market. It is seemingly just a mobile game on the Steam platform, which is not very good. The graphics and sounds are sub-par, and the gameplay is unexciting. There is very little replay value to this game. Perhaps children would enjoy it.

Overall: 4/10 – Not Recommended 

TL;DR
Pros:
+Randomized levels
+Powerups
+Trading Cards

Cons:
-Basically a mobile game
-Little replayability
-Possibly sickening visuals
-Unvaried gameplay
-Only one song

Check out my gameplay below of $1 Ride to get a better idea of the game.