Metroland is a mobile-to-console port of an endless runner game for single players. I was drawn in with its cheap price point, vibrant and detailed graphics, and the promise of a story of uprising against a draconian government. Whilst the story is an absolute non-starter and is binned after the opening cut-scene, it does set up Metroland for a competent endless runner. It just suffers from the inherent issues the genre has had for years, no matter what shiny visuals it has.
Metroland takes the standard approach of starting you off slowly each run, and then slowly cranking up the run speed the longer you survive. There are three lanes to switch between, but you can also jump over and slide under barriers and other obstacles. As you progress, you’ll also unlock a hover drone, which gives you access to the sky. One of Metroland’s best aspects is its verticality, as whenever you get the chance to pick the drone up, coins and obstacles to avoid are dangling in the sky, so they feel like tiny hidden routes that reward and challenge you differently from the standard ground routes. Even on the ground, you are often leaping between floors in buildings or unfinished motorways. It keeps things fresh and dynamic a little longer than most endless runners.
That said, Metroland has some unusual hangovers from its mobile roots. It constantly asks you to buy in-game currency with real-world money, despite being a paid game. It also asks players to log in across multiple days to unlock new areas to be included in the procedurally generated runs. It doesn’t matter if you spend two hours on a single day; you can’t unlock something until day four. So I ended up playing for a few minutes and quitting early just so I could experience Metroland with the most amount of things unlocked as possible. It’s such an odd design to have location and run unlocks tied to daily log-ins and not experience points and levelling up characters. It never sat well with me.
That’s because you’ll have to level up characters anyway. You’ll also have to level up your home base with different robots that give characters certain traits and secondary skills that don’t impact the gameplay, but what you collect. You collect some of these currencies through buying missions in another unlock set, vaults for character customisation and rare currency in another currency set, and then a weird workshop, too. These different things all layer cake on top of each other and are designed to keep you coming back day after day because they all have timers to unlock purchased upgrades. Again, this is another silly hangover from the mobile version, and once again, you can skip or reduce the waits by paying. This is more acceptable in a free-to-play ecosystem, but I’ve paid money for this, so stop it.
Ultimately, this awkward crossover from mobile to console put me off playing for the long term. The bots and characters hardly improve much beyond their first few level upgrades, and then everything else is just cosmetic. Metroland isn’t varied enough to sustain the grind it expects you to put in, and it’s not fun enough to feel like it’s worth shelling out additional money to speed up countdown meters for things I felt I’d already purchased. Whilst the actual endless running is perfectly smooth and fine (within the general genre limitations of eventual staleness of runs lasting forever), it is tarnished by keeping too much of the mobile origins in its console and PC port. Grab it on discount only, and play in short bursts.
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