Dub Dash

My first session with Dub Dash lasted about forty minutes, and I spent roughly thirty-eight of them watching my little wheel explode into pixels. That is not a complaint. This is a rhythm-action runner built on a simple promise: left and right are your only inputs, the music is the map, and the obstacles do not care about your feelings. What surprised me is how much variety Incodra packed into that narrow control scheme across nine tracks, each one introducing a new gameplay mechanic that reshapes how those two keys feel. The core form has you rolling a wheel down a 3D corridor, dodging spikes timed to the beat. Get far enough into a track and a portal shifts the whole perspective: suddenly you are side-scrolling like a Flappy Bird clone (yes, they went there), or managing two wheels simultaneously and jumping them in sync, or making hard 90-degree zig-zag turns that live and die on muscle memory. Some of those mode switches are genuinely clever, especially the split-wheel mechanic where you control both halves at once. Others, particularly the perspective swaps that go from top-down to side-on, feel jarring and give you almost no reaction time on the first obstacle after the transition. Community reception has been split on exactly this point, and it is a fair criticism. The level design rewards patience and repetition, but it does not always reward fairness. The practice mode is your best friend here. It drops a checkpoint after each completed passage, so you can learn a track in sections without grinding the full run from zero every attempt. For clearing a level and actually unlocking the next one, though, you have to do it clean in normal mode, where you start with five lives and can earn more by completing the challenge mode, a randomised single-mechanic run that is actually the most approachable entry point in the game. The life cap sits at fifteen, which means there is a ceiling on how much of a safety net you can build before a tough level. Grind-averse players will hit that wall and bounce off it hard. Now, for the couch crowd: the four-player local split-screen is genuinely the best reason to own this on PC rather than just downloading the free mobile version. Each player gets their own lane on the same track, scores accumulate while you survive, and dying benches you until the next checkpoint, so nobody sits out for long. Getting three friends to race through a neon psychedelic obstacle course while an EDM soundtrack hammers in the background is exactly the kind of stupid fun that holds up for an hour or two. Fair warning on the visuals though: the screen is aggressively bright, strobing, and colour-saturated. If anyone in your group is photosensitive, sit this one out. And if anyone has a hangover, same advice applies. Content-wise, nine tracks is thin. The challenge mode adds some replay, but there is no custom music, no level editor, and development stopped effectively after 2016, so what you see today is what you get. Headphones are strongly recommended, because the soundtrack from Bossfight and the Geometry Dash roster of DJs is the glue holding the whole experience together. When the music and the obstacle pattern lock in, even a frustrating track becomes satisfying to grind. When they do not lock in, it just feels like reflex punishment with a good DJ set playing over it.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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