Giana Sisters: Dream Runners is a platforming racing game, which is meant to be directed at the competitive scene. Set in a brightly coloured environment, you race in a clockwise pattern trying to get far enough ahead of your opponents to knock them off the screen. Do that three times and you win the race. Simple enough right? You wish. There are all sorts of obstacles to trip you up on the way through, so it ends up being far more balanced than getting a lead and holding it.
Straight off the bat, the bright colours and all female characters instantly attract your attention, and this is a good thing, as the colours are warm, in comparison to most games which have a darker palette. The characters have a story, but this is not touched upon in this excursion, which I think is a little disappointing.
The main menu only offers three game modes: Ranked Match, Online Match and Quick Match. There is no practice mode, or any semblance of a story mode, leaving players who are new to the game having to stumble and bumble their way along an increasingly frustrating first level, and being left in the dust of the Easy Bot on Quick Match mode.
The maps are divided down by colour, with green being the easiest, yellow indicating medium difficulty and red becoming the hard option. You can play as any character and fill in the bots with easy, medium and hard difficulties. You don’t want hard, trust me!
The biggest issue with the game has to be the controls. For a competitive multiplayer game, this is of paramount importance. They’re clunky and feel like a massive step down from the amazing Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams. They are just horrific. End of. Trying to find a list of controls without using the internet is impossible. Learning them as you go through the level is hard enough, but then watching as your character gets wiped out for having left the side of screen is ridiculous. The most outrageous control is crouch and slide, which is on the D-pad. So either I have to take my finger off the movement stick or I have to reach across the controller to hit the button. Some of the triggers and bumpers are not even used so why can’t they be used instead? To combine that with the frustration of having no control options, or ways to change the buttons, just makes this into a highly displeasing situation.
Apart from that, the multitude of different obstacles make life extremely irritating even on a basic level. The different slowing forces are wide and numerous. You can become blocked by rocks, slowed by tornadoes, electrocuted by streams of electricity, and that’s not including the amount of things that players can throw at you. Players can throw bombs and shoot themselves forward in a swirling sphere of energy, leaving you momentarily stunned.
The game requires you to power up by collecting diamonds to generate power for your abilities. Often you find yourself missing diamonds because of obstacles, or losing a bunch of them when you take damage from the distractions. Another issue is the level design because while there different planes on which to run through on a mission, you find yourself following the bots.
Giana Sisters: Dream Runners is a game that I categorically did not enjoy. I could only play a limited amount of time in one sitting as it would send me of into fits of rage, like I had not experienced before. It left me with a bad aftertaste, and left me wanting to do something more destructive, namely feeling the need to murder some graphical imagination personified by a vast array of pixels. I found myself getting increasingly frustrated at my flailing ineptitude to get past the first level. They really need to improve the controls.
I would not recommend purchasing this, as it will drive you nuts with its various frustrating mechanics and confusing controls. In my personal opinion it has failed at being a competitive multiplayer game, and has been relegated to the doormat of party games. I can’t believe this is such a massive step down from Giana Sisters: Dream Runners.
Ben was a regular ICXM contributor between 2014–2017, publishing 45 articles across game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative.