Made by a small studio in Wales, UK, Infinity Runner is Wales Interactive’s latest entry into the world of video games. The premise is simple: you’re a man running through a huge ship called The Infinity, and need to escape from those that have imprisoned you. Sounds easy enough, but add in some werewolves and an endless runner game mechanic and you have a weird mix of concepts on your hands.

You start off breaking out of an enclosure and being talked to remotely, in a similar vein to the way you’re spoken to in Borderlands whenever Angel communicates with your character. You’re told you need to get a move on before the guards get to you, and so begins your running, which won’t stop for a while. The first room you happen upon has guards in it. At this point the game takes over your controls and kills them for you. Once they’re taken care of, you’re running again down never-ending corridors, ready to encounter the next gameplay mechanic that you need to master: turning at intersections. Infinity Runner doesn’t automatically turn corners for you, and in a mechanic similar to Temple Run on smartphones, you need to manually move the character left or right at every junction. This is done through moving the mouse right or left to look around the corner; failure to do so will result in death, which can be irritating at times, but you’ll get used to it. 

Infinity Runner is made up endless corridors. The primary goal is to collect as many “notes” as you can find whilst traversing these corridors, avoiding any obstacles that are thrown your way (this is done by pressing A or D to strafe left or right). The obstacles are strange and unique in most cases, meaning you’re going to die quite often as you don’t know what to expect or how to deal with some of them. This isn’t a bad thing per se, as you get 3 lives on each level, so you can start again at a checkpoint, but it does mean you’re constantly thrown in at the deep end and have to learn the game and how to handle its various obstacles through a process of trial and error.

Occasionally you’ll come across a room with a few guards in, at which point you need to complete a quick time event in order to kill them all and carry on moving through the corridors - failing a single key press results in instant death. At the end of each level you're given a quick summary of how long the stage took you to finish (which, apart from dying - which takes up time - shouldn’t vary too much), the score you earned, and how many notes you collected. What little replayability Infinity Runner provides, the challenge of perfecting your runs can definitely be seen as a part of it.

One mechanic that breaks the standard gameplay up a bit is when you turn into a werewolf, which happens at very specific sections of certain levels. The werewolf power up allows you to basically move throughout the environment without any movement on your own part (if you so wish). All notes in corridors are automatically collected without having to collide with them, and all enemies are killed without you having to perform any quick time events. Eventually the game will teach you a new mechanic with the werewolf, which is to smash through walls, revealing secret sections where you can collect as many notes as you’d like. These sections all feel a little contrived and akin to bonus levels from the Sonic games of yesteryear, with special stages where you can collect more of your point-attributing items.

There are multiple game modes to be found within Infinity Runner. As well as the main campaign there's also an arcade mode, where you can compete with friends or strangers on the leaderboard for the amount of time lasted or how fast you can complete the levels. There’s also multiplayer, where players battle it out on the same course without seeing each other, collecting as many points as possible on the same run.

The ship of The Infinity is a fairly bland place for the most part but it does occasionally open up and show you some very interesting sections, especially when you’re overlooking Earth in some of the more open levels. The graphics aren’t that great - graphically Infinity Runner is perhaps comparable to a typical mobile game these days - but as you’re constantly running extremely quickly you’re not likely to be keeping a critical eye on your surroundings anyway. The music is also a mixed bag, with some themes from the soundtrack being quite addictive and mesmerising, but other tracks are boring to the point of making you want to quit your current stage if you’ve died a few times. 

Infinity Runner can unfortunately feel buggy and glitchy in places. For example, there are times when the checkpoint is located far too close to a wall, meaning respawning essentially kills you over and over again until you run out of lives and have to restart the level from scratch again. The aforementioned lack of explanation for certain game mechanics, which forces you to engage in a process of trial and error, can also be frustrating. 

Infinity Runner starts off rough, and doesn’t get much more polished as the main campaign unfolds. It boasts an interesting setting and premise - one which had me intrigued from the game's trailers and what I’d heard on the grapevine - but one that is never fully realised or exploited to its full potential. Infinity Runner manages to be mediocre in every sense of the word. Some will find the game entertaining and replayable, but I for one won’t be coming back to it any time soon.