Supermoves PC Review
Summary: Simplistic at its core, Supermoves takes the parkour out of the action context seen in other games from the last decade and turns it into a fast and fluid freerun racing experience that’s enjoyable solo and with friends.
4.7
Parkour!
As someone whose favourite game is Mirror’s Edge, I’m drawn to the few games like it that let you parkour in first-person, like Dying Light and the upcoming Perfect Dark reboot. By the time I’d made my best approximation of Faith Connors, I was dying to jump right in. Supermoves is a parkour platformer playable in first- and third-person. It’s very clearly influenced by the modern movement of Mirror’s Edge Catalyst and Dying Light, and the retro gameplay of completing objectives around a map in a Pro Skater/Freestyle BMX fashion. It even has you collecting the letters of “super” around the map and grinding on rails.
Movement feels very fast and slippery, moreso than I thought I could handle to begin with, but it becomes manageable once you settle into the handling. Wallruns, wallclimbs and slides are considerably generous in the speed and height they give you, which means you can keep your momentum no matter how you keep traversing, so long as you keep moving. You’ll also find a lot of trampolines, ziplines, tightropes and skateboard-esque grinds to build and keep your momentum. Additionally, wallruns can be chained, and you have six special “supermoves” which act as special abilities. The air and sliding supermoves give you height and distance, while others are used to climb walls that are otherwise too high or to temporarily negate the balance minigame while grinding or on a tightrope. The in-air supermoves are the most useful in my opinion, and can save you from a mistimed or misplaced jump.
Right off the bat, you have the ability to create your own character. There isn’t a large wealth of customisation options, but there’s enough for you to get started, with more clothing unlocked through level progression. This is done by completing daily and weekly challenges in online tournaments, which currently aren’t varied enough. It feels like the daily challenges are always the same, just in a different order. The character model graphics aren’t fantastic, but the art direction, the lighting, and the vibes are immaculate. Currently there are only 7 locales, but they all look and feel very distinct from each other. If you don’t like the rooftop setting of Singapore, the backlot in New York City might be more your speed. If urban backgrounds aren’t your thing, maybe you’ll enjoy the Finnish countryside or Caribbean ocean more.
My only real gripe with the game is its performance optimisation; for most games, my RTX 2060 is typically enough to manage 1080p60 at high visual settings, but for Supermoves I had to turn most settings down to their lowest and enable DLSS to hit 60 frames per second, though I still suffered framedrops in the tournament lobby area.
Career mode is the single-player campaign, split into two types of events per locale, a free-roam area with 9 small missions, and four different races. Completion of those missions and each spot you finish above in the top three counts as a goal, which is how you progress to the next place in the world. The locales don’t look especially like their namesake, aside from notable landmarks such as the Marina Bay Sands in the distance while ziplining through an inexplicably-flooded Singapore. These Pro Skater-esque runs are a lot easier than their influences, many objectives don’t have timers and those that do typically aren’t very tight. After completion of career mode, you can prestige and play through it all again.
Besides career mode or playing individual maps, the core multiplayer experience is running online tournaments consisting of 6 randomly-selected races. Maps seem to cap out anywhere around 40–60 players, but unfortunately there just aren’t enough players. I tried searching for tournaments at different times of day but I was usually the only person playing, and in the cases where others did join, nobody made it to the end of that tourney. The game lets you earn XP in private tournaments though, for those who only want to play with friends or solo. The most fun I had playing the game was playing the races solo with a randomised selection and no AI racers.
Additionally, the game comes with a course creator suite. You can set your course from any locale and race gamemode regardless of career progress, but you don’t have much control over it otherwise. Your course is made entirely of standard components like boxes and ziplines but object placement can be very finicky without the grid enabled. It feels quite rudimentary, but it’s still a nice addition that keeps its replayability up.
The soundtrack is typically electronic, notably driven by bright plucks in its ambience and sawtooth basses in its action cues, but it also carries an air of funk throughout in its bass and guitar rhythms and mutes, and slick-moving epianos. Some stages also have context-appropriate arrangements, such as steel drums in the ocean stage and a grandiose, orchestral arrangement of the main menu theme during the stadium tournaments. My favourite track is the Singapore theme, its opening synth ambience brings a tinge of Mirror’s Edge airspace, before contrarily invoking a very Shoji Meguro-esque guitar lead from his Persona soundtracks.
The in-game music also dynamically transitions to a fuller, more intense version of the track when a race or mission starts. It’s more noticeable in the mission areas where you have short tasks to achieve, as you can hear the music kick up and shift down gears as you finish up and regain freeroam control again.
Final Thoughts
It’s really a shame that the playerbase is so small, because Supermoves is a fantastic outing for freerunning in video games… if you can run it. It’s fast, it’s fluid, the supermoves are run-savers and you typically have more than one way to approach any race, allowing beginner and veteran players to always have alternate options for variety and challenge. I loved every minute of playing it.
About the Author
Dylan McCarthy PKA Alpine Escape, a music and sound design production student with a life-long obsession for video games.
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