Aerial_Knight's We Never Yield (XS) - Review

by Lee Mehr , posted on 14 August 2024 / 1,469 Views

Endless Runners have found greener pastures in the mobile market since the early 2010s. That's a shame too given their storied history on earlier consoles and PC, some of which were among the year's best. Enter Aerial_Knight's We Never Yield – not to be confused with developer Neil Jones' first solo project: Aerial_Knight's Never Yield (2021). Needless marketing migraine aside, the drive to transplant this old-school template with some modern sensibilities could pique the interest of a certain niche. Sadly, that opportunity is resoundingly squandered.

Stepping into the shoes of two brothers, Wally and Lone, you set out to escape the ruins of what's apparently their afro-futurist kingdom by birthright. After being rescued from prison, the pair team up in order to defeat their vile and envious aunt who seeks to rule the land. While not on the best terms, they begrudgingly work together in order to both save their people and reclaim the nation.

What this looks like in practice is an endless runner wholly focused on button inputs; both brothers are affixed to their direction like trains on a track. As they're zooming through these ruins they'll have to navigate past obstacles by jumping, sliding, and so on, with a score meter judging the timing of each move. Losing the added challenge of directional inputs is partially alleviated by Yield's default solo mode making you command both brothers' inputs simultaneously.

The control scheme is quite basic: jump (Y/up on D-pad), slide (A/down on D-pad), attack (B/right on D-pad), and zipline (X/left on D-pad). Game over if either brother fails. Naturally, this starts out with both brothers sliding past the same concrete beam and leaping over the same suspiciously-placed spiky fence; over time, though, the inputs become slightly more varied and complex. Similar to other "single-player co-op" games, like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, it's a bit like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time. Having to make snap decisions with one brother bashing through a concrete wall while the other slides below a pillar, especially when both obstacles are staggered, is at least something to play with.

Aerial_Knight's more artificial means of difficulty on the other hand is the camera itself. I can sympathize with wanting to have a more motivated lens that continually alters perspectives (a la Grand Theft Auto's vehicular cinematic mode). Given the straitened budget, it's not easy to preserve player momentum with the same animation of a winged demon slicing a stone column at its base or another summoning jagged rocks from the ground. But that creative decision can feel more schizophrenic and desperate when it actively diminishes visual information. Even the default, slightly-tilted angle to simultaneously show the brothers in the foreground and background feels slightly off-putting; it never feels comfortable to do conjoined jumps or slides when Wally always appears to be a yard behind. The less said about various zoomed-in angles facing the side or front of them the better.

All told, there's not much more to it beyond well-timed inputs through a multitude of vaguely afro-futurist architecture, or more Tron-esque levels in the supplementary challenge rooms. The one secondary mechanic after filling up your bottom meter is essentially a type of super mode, temporarily making every cleared obstacle explode (paging Michael Bay!) and increasing the amount of points earned. It's not much, but the pencil-drawn animation of Wally & Stone powering up together is a slick touch. There are other modes to play around with, like local co-op and a "Chill Mode" where you only manage Wally's inputs, along with three difficulty tiers: Normal, Hard, and Insane.

The reason these extras fall on deaf ears comes back to Yield's sheer repetition. Who's honestly excited to complete or replay a sub-two-hour campaign after ducking under the same stone pillar, hopping over the same barricade, escaping the same spider monster, and riding the same zip line? The environs may alter between different nondescript ruins and the soundtrack may segue from serviceable hip-hop to hard rock beats between stages, but the interminable onslaught of recycled obstacles makes each run feel the same.

One morsel of credit Yield deserves is the general tempo of the five episodes. Disregarding the repetition of the levels themselves, splitting each episode into three chapters is a good balance on paper. That gives just enough opportunity to score stars (max of three per episode), which can be banked towards new ethereal weapon cosmetics and/or outfits. While also a nice, succinct way to incorporate down time between the runner segments in theory, what scarce story bits are given – be it characterization or context – simply don't land due to lifeless voice acting, inconsistent audio mixing, and bland dialogue. Perhaps I'd have a tinge more praise if I could actually reach the final act.

A lackluster, overpriced endless runner on its own wouldn't be far below the shamelessly corporate slop of Suicide Squad in my eyes. Yield doesn't stop there though. Not since Lord of the Rings: Gollum have I played a game that feels practically impossible to finish. To break down the multitudinous bugs and technical mishaps, I'll use bullet points:

The second-half of Episode 4 – Chapter 2 is almost impossible to complete should you mess up on your initial run. If you do, respawning at the nearest checkpoint consistently results in one specific camera angle clipping through the underside of Wally & Stone's hoverboards. It's only possible to get past these parts by either restarting whole cloth or counting down the time to the next obstacle(s) and hoping the camera resets itself.
All checkpoints of Episode 4 – Chapter 3 are bugged, which means each failure restarts at the beginning. This is made all the more annoying because even the friendly AI on Chill Mode is capable of failing certain jumps. The reason why is because its collision detection is unreliable. Even with Chill Mode on Normal difficulty – which wasn't my initial choice – this level gives Battletoads' hover-bike scene a run for its money; less about pure reflexes and more about memorizing obstacle placement and luck. The majority of deaths don't even feel like your fault.

That's to say nothing of the framerate cratering into the single digits quite often, a general sense of input delay, and other strange technical or design issues. It's also frustrating why players have to finish a chapter in order to unlock it in the menu, versus the standard way of just… unlocking it at the start. Because of that decision, each time I tried having another go at Ep. 4 – 3 I also had to drudge through Ep. 4 – 2's bullshit as well. After dozens and dozens of retries, I can confidently say there ought to be an indefinite window for refunding this ($15 retail) until Aerial_Knight releases a proper update. The one olive branch I can extend is this: the challenge levels don't have such egregious progress-halting bugs like the campaign's aforementioned examples.

Stale, repetitive, and unengaging would be the first adjectives that come to mind for Aerial_Knight's We Never Yield, were it not also buggy and unfinished. That's a damn shame too given this is a small indie project rolling the dice on a less-popular genre today – at least on consoles and PC. But the genre still deserves – at a bare minimum – to not have examples that cause me to question how it got past quality control. Whether currently limited to the Xbox Series version or not, this simply wasn't fit to ship.

Contractor by trade and writer by hobby, Lee's obnoxious criticisms have found a way to be featured across several gaming sites: N4G, VGChartz, Gaming Nexus, DarkStation, and TechRaptor! He started gaming in the mid-90s and has had the privilege in playing many games across a plethora of platforms. Reader warning: each click given to his articles only helps to inflate his Texas-sized ego. Proceed with caution.