Speedrunners: An Early Access Success

SpeedRunner.  He runs speeds.

SpeedRunners began life in 2011 as a lowly single-player flash game by the name of SpeedRunner.  Later that year, it was released on Xbox Live Arcade as SpeedRunner HD, with a host of upgrades including fixes and offline multiplayer.  On 26/08/13, SpeedRunners was released into Steam Early Access with online multiplayer, and was fully released on 19/04/16.

What makes it so impressive as an early access game is that that first steam release wasn't some half baked engine with a broken testing map.  It was a fully formed game, with 3 functional maps and 5 characters.  It received regular updates, with the addition of bots and another 3 maps within only a month of first release.  Now, the base game has 16 maps, 24 characters with at least 4 skins each, community maps, ranked play, and a single-player story mode.

And this is exactly how paid early access should be done.  It's an odd mix of alpha (development), beta (bug-fixing), and full release: A fully playable game with no major bugs to begin with, and development and bug-fixing throughout.  People are paying for it, so developers have no excuse to use it as a testing ground for a game that's bug-ridden or still in alpha.

So how does the final game hold up, disregarding the build up? Pretty damn well.  The years of development and polish have resulted in a tight, responsive platform racer.  The item system, reminiscent of Mario Kart's, can be left on for party-game shenanigans, or turned off to give a heavily skill based, rewarding experience.  The DLC is all cosmetic, with 2 Youtuber character packs of 4 and a variety of speed trails.

As a local multiplayer, it's pretty much perfect.  My only real grievance with the game is the online networking.  Due to how fast paced the game is, it only takes one person with high latency to screw everything up, since attacks you could normally normally react to and dodge after they launch them can become undodgeable even if you know they're coming and react in advance.  This is because it uses a peer-to-peer network, which is far cheaper than a server based network.  The latter would protect those with low ping, but make the game pretty much unplayable for those with high ping.  So unfortunately, the problem's here to stay.

Overall, I think DoubleDutch and TinyBuild have done a fantastic job.  SpeedRunners is an amazing game with incredible local play and great online play, that leaves the rest of early access in its dust.