Hello fellow gamers and people alike.
Today i'll be reviewing and giving some tips on how to get better at Subway Surfers. Yes, a mobile game and i know they get somewhat of a bad reputation, and deservedly so.
A lot of them have microtransactions that force you to spend money to play the game or force you to wait for hours to advance to following level; this latter example of "shit about mobile games" is terrible. Games are for entertainment, not work.
So, back to Subway Surfers. I've been playing this game for maybe a decade; not everyday or anything like that. Sometimes i don't play it for months at a time, but i always enjoy coming back to it.
Why? Well, in a few words, it's not so much a "traditional" mobile game with all the negative aspects i pointed earlier, but more as an arcade game (which incidentally would be awesome to see it in an arcade format). It's one of those. One of those games that you can play for hours on end, without all the mobile gaming bullshit.
That said, i've played it so much that i think that i can offer a few hints on how to get good at it. If you've played it, you know that at a certain point, everything on screen starts to move faster, to increase difficulty. Well, i've come to a point where i see the fastest speed the game offers in almost slow motion!
TIPS
- Upgrade all your boosts; Jetpack, Super Sneakers, Coin Magnet and 2x Multiplier). Super Sneakers being the most important for achieving longer runs, and 2x Multiplier to achieve higher scores. The Coin Magnet is great to get more coins during a run. The Jetpack, honestly, is not that great. all you get is a couple dozen coins while you fly over the level for 25 seconds and you miss out on picking up all the goodies on the ground level. I actively avoid picking them up.
- Get a hoverboard with the Bouncer ability. This allows you to jump very high (the highest the game allows, as opposed to not wearing a board and having a pathetic jump); this way you don't have to navigate the ground floor maze of incoming trains and barriers, which is the hardest part of the game. I use the Bouncer board. This board is like having the Super Sneakers activated.
- Wearing a hoverboard with the Bouncer ability halts the Super Sneakers' timer (these items you can catch and wear during a run, like the Super Sneakers, all have a usage timer which ends). With this combo of Bouncer hoverboard and Super Sneakers, you'll rarely find yourself without the high jump. When the Bouncer hoverboard wears off, you start using the Super Sneakers (which allows you to jump as high as using the Bouncer hoverboard). Seeing you can activate another hoverboard after 5 seconds of it wearing off, that's just 5 seconds of Super Sneaker usage (out of 30 seconds, if you've upgraded your Super Sneaker boost). During the time you play, wearing a hoverboard you're almost always guaranteed to pick up another Super Sneaker, filling up it's time meter again. This is the basic of basics for longer runs.
It also means you need a lot of hoverboards (because you're constantly activating them).
To get a lot of hoverboards, just spend a few minutes opening Mystery Boxes in the game's store. Opening one costs 500 coins each but the game's made in a way where, whether you open 10 or 100, you end up more or less with the same amount of coins. And if you choose to watch and ad every now and then (to double up those 5,000 or 10,000 coin rewards that appear sometimes), then you'll even end up with more coins than when you started opening boxes. So, by the time you're fed up of opening boxes, you'll find yourself with a ton of boards (and every item you can use in-game). So doing a little grind with Mystery Boxes is well worth it to get a ton of items to help long runs.
When using the Super Sneakers and Bouncer hoverboard you will pick up items from under your path, like a magnet, if you jump over them. So you don't have to worry about having to jump "through" the floating items in order to catch them.
Having a board always active will allow you to crash into a barrier, and not have the game be over. It's like an insta-revival, instead of a game over. So always keep a board active.
Use you index finger instead of your thumb to control the character! You have way better and faster control of your index finger than your thumb.
You can cancel any jump you make, mid-jump (including the Pogo Stick's jump) by scrolling down. When i first started playing Subway Surfers, i played for a few minutes where i didn't know i could cancel all jumps by scrolling down, and it was impossible to play for more that a few seconds. So, know that.
Keep to the top of the trains. This is more important when you don't have a board or sneakers, but the score of the game is not dependent on the coins you pick up, or anything else for that matter.The score is only based on time passed in the run; If there was the ability to fly, indefinitely, over every barrier, without picking up anything, including coins, your score would keep increasing until the game ran out of score digits to keep track.
DIFFICULTY
The difficulty of this game lies mostly in how long you can stay interested. The game's difficulty does not ramp up past certain point.
CONTENT
But, there's a ton of content, in the form of Events being added to the game, with different modes being experimented, which makes it interesting, making me want to play towards beating those objectives and checking out the different modes.
As for objectives, there's Daily Quests, Seasonal Quests where each season lasts for about two weeks each.
Season Hunts, which give you free characters and different hoverboards, to increase your personal collection.
Mission Sets which give you three objectives to beat the set, and you can do these sets infinite amounts of times.
And Achievements, with the most engaging one being achieving top place in the online leaderboards. And also other game modes, like i said being added. There's one without any coins or power-ups to pick up, where you have to avoid barriers, and this mode does keep ramping up. It's insanely difficult.
It's a completionist's dream game.
ADS
All in all, Subway Surfers is good arcade game, when you're up to beat some objectives.
Ad-wise, it's very non-intrusive. You get very little ads for playing the game. Almost none, i'd say. Even if one pops up while you're navigating the game's different UI pages (to look at quests and other stats) they're not time based - just close it and that's it. But even these are rare.
Most ads are attached to earning extra stuff when you complete objectives, outside of gameplay. Say you gain 1,000 coins; a little ad button tells you that you can double those coins if you watch a 30 second ad. It's totally up to you.
RECOMMENDED
There are no ads during gameplay. Nor any waiting periods. You can just play the game.
That's why i recommend it.
Do you have any tips for subway Surfers? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading this impromptu post i thought about posting while playing the game!