I first discovered developer Neil Jones when reviewing his debut title, Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield, a few years ago. I was a big fan of his work, and delighted to find out a sequel was on its way. The one man development team once again works his online alias into the title of this latest project, Aerial_Knight’s We Never Yield.
Wally is back, this time with his brother Lone in tow. In Aerial_Knight’s We Never Yield the action is set in our kings’ homeland, which is overrun by evil, looking to trip them up at every turn (quite literally in some cases). The difference here is that you are tasked with controlling both runners at the same time.
The D-Pad and the A,B,X and Y buttons work as two sets of four outputs, one for each brother. If you’ve played the first game, you’ll be familiar with how it all works as little has changed when it comes to the structure of the gameplay.
Both Wally and Lone automatically sprint through the levels, your task is to ensure they get through unscathed. One hit and you’ll be thrown back to the last checkpoint (thankfully you’ll pass through these often enough).
Hazards are colour coded, and the vast majority of the time follow the pattern. For example, purple hazards will require your characters to slide underneath them. Red coloured obstacles will require Wally and Lone to jump over them to avoid a nasty collision. Certain objects and enemies will need to be smashed through, and these are coloured blue. Finally, yellow switches are required to open gates, and use ziplines. The trick is not only figuring out which move you need to pull off, but remembering which brother you’re controlling. Even on the regular difficulty, Aerial_Knight’s We Never Yield seems simple but is actually quite tricky.
Well, it’s tricky to bag yourself three stars and a high ranking anyway. There are five episodes, each containing three levels to sprint through. In between each episode you’ll arrive at a safe zone, where you can chat to Lone, buy new weapons and outfits with your hard earned stars, and get a bit more backstory.
There are also challenge levels to attempt, and these up the ante even more. For the sadists out there, the more difficult modes will give you less time to react to hazards as well as chucking more at you. Although you’re really asking for it if you want to venture anywhere other than the normal difficulty because some of the later levels give you nanoseconds to react as it is.
If you whizz through the game it won’t take you too long to beat Aerial_Knight’s We Never Yield, but this time there are more ways to play, which are geared towards getting you to come back for more.
To take the edge off, you may want to give co-op mode a whirl. This allows you to get some help, as you both control one character each on the same screen. Otherwise, you can try out the chill mode, which plays like the first game and tasks you with just the one brother to keep out of harm’s way.
There is, however, a problem. It’s at this point I need to discuss the numerous, serious performance issues I encountered with Aerial_Knight’s We Never Yield. First off, during each level the camera will change angles, giving you different perspectives on Wally and Lone’s parkour acrobatics. However, at several points when the shift happens, the frame rate performance plummets and things get stuttery to say the least.
Sadly, that’s not the worst of it. In one level I died halfway through, and everytime I restarted the camera sank below the ground, meaning I couldn’t see either character, and more importantly, the upcoming hazards. The camera was still tracking them, just a few metres too low. As a result I had to restart the level from the beginning because it was literally impossible to play.
On a different level there was a point where I made the wrong move, and should have died, but instead slid through the rocks and onto the other side. Both characters were running in an endless void with no way out, so I had to restart the level. Oh, and just to rub salt in the wound, when you restart the level from the pause menu all previous deaths still count, hammering your score, which is unnecessarily harsh.
There were also numerous points where I died despite being absolutely certain I’d cleared the obstacle. One such example was whilst I was coming off a zipwire, I couldn’t stick the landing and Wally was spinning all over the place, meaning I kept dying no matter how hard I tried. There was another level where I kept dying at the same point for an unknown reason, until the game had enough and completely crashed.
Unfortunately these examples actually stopped me progressing, such was their seriousness. As a result, just as I started to enjoy myself an issue would crop up and spoil my fun. The game desperately needs a patch.
Something else which baffled me was that if you don’t complete a level and quit, you will have to play the previous one again to unlock it. This is also the case with safe zones, so if you don’t complete Episode 2 Lv1 for example, you’ll have to play through Episode 1 Lv 3 all over again to unlock the safe zone, and then progress to Episode 2. It’s ludicrous.
Further, this time around I also felt the locations had less character than in the first game, less details to offer. The good news is that Aerial_Knight’s We Never Yield still looks and sounds absolutely brilliant when it’s working as it should. The afro-futurist style still oozes character, and I’ll never tire of watching the sequence where Wally powers up. It’s awesome. Not only does the soundtrack rock once again, but this time there’s full voice acting too.
However, If I put all issues aside for a moment this is very much more of the same as the first game, despite this time being twice as complicated. My concern here is that the technical problems are so frequent and significant, frustration would set in and I struggled to find the replayability that Aerial_Knight’s We Never Yield is so clearly geared towards.
You may end up frustrated with Aerial_Knight’s We Never Yield, because while it is enjoyable in parts, problems make it feel like a huge step backwards. That is a real shame.
