Like Super Mario Bros. played in fast-forward, as designed by a sadist., Hyper
Like Super Mario Bros. played in fast-forward, as designed by a sadist. Imagine the unholy union of Super Mario Bros. and Super Hexagon, and you’ ll see a glimpse of the thinking behind Miles & Kilo. What in stills appears to be a sweet-natured retro-infused platformer is in fact a videogame sadist, relentlessly eager to showcase what a banana-thumbed buffoon you are. Reckon you’ re a dab-hand at side-scrollers? Play this one and think again. And yet it all begins innocently enough. Miles and his dog, Kilo, are flying when a storm brings down their plane on a remote island. Unfortunately, the place is inhabited by mean-spirited goons who grab vital bits of the downed craft and scarper. Your aim: get everything back – and not get killed. You rapidly discover both those things are very tricky indeed. SPEED RUN Miles & Kilo plays out as an auto-runner. Miles sprints along, and you prod the left of the screen to jump, or the right of the screen to trigger a context-sensitive action. This might involve lobbing fruit at a monkey about to belt you with a coconut, or performing a death-avoiding roll underneath massive spikes some idiot’s left nailed to a tree. The basics are nothing you haven’ t seen before on mobile, but Miles & Kilo ably differentiates itself by regularly shaking things up. Before long, you’ re performing Sonic-like homing attacks on angry wildlife, zooming along on a mine cart, surfing on a lava flow, wall-jumping like a ninja, and holding on for dear life as your leashed dog zooms after a black cat. It’s colourful, giddy, compelling fun – albeit with a dash of masochism. Like any good platform game, Miles & Kilo revels in tight level design; but here it’s tight to the point that the gap between life and death is paper-thin. A fraction of a second out with a jump? Dead. Didn’ t get the precise sequence of jump/action right in a particularly demanding and complex section? Dead. Haven’ t quite understood the surprising level of nuance in the controls? Likely very, very dead. To add insult to injury, reach a level’s end, having battled it for a good 15 minutes (you get infinite lives, which is just as well) , and you’ ll realise your time is about 30 seconds. Then the game will laugh at your pitiful effort, giving you a poor grade for having not collected all the stars along the way. Occasionally, the difficulty level grates, especially during an arduous boss battle chasing a mummy through a cave. But when you do crack a level, you feel like a gaming god – until the next one puts you right back in your place.
