In Run Pizza Run, you take on the role of a pizza delivery person tasked with delivering 20 pizzas. This should be easy, but the world has gone mad, and cars are exploding and speeding forward to kill anyone in their way. Just crossing the street in Run Pizza Run is an intense experience, but it falls flat quickly.
What You See Is What You Get
Delivering pizzas in Run Pizza Run gets old very quickly because all you do is avoid cars in between drop-offs. Aside from watching your pizza stack fall and seeing your drop-offs decrease, there’s no real sense of progression. When you finish the game, you’re given an end screen congratulating you. That’s really it, and it feels like a waste of time.
Obviously, this was just an open beta. Still, even with missions, it’s hard to imagine that this will be anything more because even the Steam description tells potential customers exactly what I’ve said above. To be honest, it feels like an asset flip because I’ve seen these same assets in many stores for Unreal and Unity. I only say that because there seems to have been so little thought put into this game; I can’t imagine why it’d need a beta.
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The game felt so empty that our beta key felt like an alpha key. Nothing stands out as the player runs to those drop-offs hoping not to die. It’s like Frogger but with an open world in 3D. There needs to be more reason to keep going because the payoff is abysmally small. The game gets very boring very quickly because the concept is way too simple and doesn’t build from there.
Running down the street in the game is at least a little bit fun because each car lets you see it for a few seconds before it takes off. So this gives you a sense of timing. It makes things feel really fair because you won’t often get hit by a car you didn’t see prior.
Finishing a round takes about 10 attempts, and the game saves checkpoints for every five pizzas you deliver. I found myself beating the first round in seven attempts, and it got a lot less from there. You tend to understand when and where to run quickly.
It Is Optimized Incredibly Well
For a game with many explosions and cars flying everywhere, there’s almost no lag. Sure, there are instances where the game slows down for a second or two, but otherwise, it runs pretty smoothly. I’m not exaggerating; there are handfuls of cars just speeding off and crashing all around the player. That kind of thing would normally crush a game because of how much a physics engine would have to handle.
When looking around at the cars flying, you don’t expect how well they bounce off things. They don’t clip, glitch, or anything like that. It’s a smooth process from start to finish, which surprised me. Even the running animation is done incredibly well; this really feels like a way someone would run with pizzas.
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Whoever the programmer is deserves high praise. They optimized this game to a degree that’s rarely seen. Whoever coded this should be on bigger projects because they ensured this game wouldn’t crash for any reason other than a player’s computer. In fact, I never experienced more than a bit of lag for a few seconds every 10 to 20 minutes while playing.
Overall, it’s a masterpiece in terms of bug squashing and programming. That doesn’t make it any better gameplay wise, but it’s worth mentioning.
It Feels Like It Was Made From A 20-Minute Tutorial
There’s nothing wrong with buying assets for your game, but nothing stands out about the art in Run Pizza Run. The game only has its bare-bones gameplay, so you’d hope there’d be something else to keep a player invested. Unfortunately, Run Pizza Run looks like a game you could make yourself after a short Unity tutorial.
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If you can program cars to drive slowly for a few seconds and then rush forward at unbelievable speeds while knocking over character NPCs, then you have half the game ready. The other half is programming a pizza to disappear and a counter to go up whenever the player hits a drop-off point.
It’s really that simple, and it’s not something you expect to go onto Steam. In my opinion, anyone in college studying game development – specifically programming – could probably make this game in less than a month, especially if they bought the art assets from a store.
Verdict
This is IZI Games’ first title on Steam, and to be honest, it doesn’t look or play very well. I would recommend everyone reading this to stay away from this game. The only other Curator that reviewed it gave it a recommendation, but that same Curator had no profile picture, was called “Reviews fast,” which sounds like a service you can pay for, and only gave two games a “not recommended” score.
It’s a game you can beat within 20 minutes, and your only option is to do it again. While there is some thrill in trying to cross a large street since you’re not sure if a car will run you over, the game just feels like a running simulator since you’re going to sprint from one place to the other.
Overall, it’s not a good game and, in my opinion, would not be worth any amount of money on Steam. Avoid this if you can; we’re giving it the lowest score possible.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Optimized very well | The game is repetitive |
| There’s nothing to do but run from location to location | |
| The game is short |
Rating: 0/10
GamesHorizon received a Review Copy for Steam.
