Hover: Revolt of Gamers

Hover: Revolt of Gamers is a third-person (and optional first-person) parkour open-world game set in ECP17, a towering futuristic city on a distant planet where an authoritarian administrator has outlawed all forms of fun. You play as a freshly cloned recruit joining a ragtag resistance called the Gamers, grinding rails, spraying graffiti, outrunning e-cops, and returning confiscated game consoles to citizens. The premise is gloriously dumb, the colour palette is electric, and the Jet Set Radio and Mirror's Edge DNA is impossible to miss the moment you start chaining wall-pushes, slides, and flips across the city's vertical skyline. The movement system is where Hover earns its goodwill. Running at speed, grinding rails, bouncing off walls, and launching yourself between skyscrapers feels smooth and genuinely satisfying when it all strings together. There is also a rewind mechanic that lets you snap back to a previous position after a bad fall, which saves a lot of frustration in the taller sections of the map. The city itself is structured vertically from grimy underground sewers up through mid-city districts to the brighter admin zones near the top, and just exploring that gradient keeps things interesting for a while. The soundtrack, featuring composer Hideki Naganuma, fits the aesthetic perfectly and keeps the energy up. Where things get rocky is in the mission design and the multiplayer hooks. The game offers races, Gameball (essentially parkour basketball where teams fight over a ball and score on opposing goals), delivery runs, and stealth infiltration sections in the sewer and prison zones. Races are the highlight, pointing you through routes you might not have found on your own. Gameball in theory is wild and chaotic fun, but in practice it tends to drag and lacks clarity on goals and ball spawns. The stealth prison missions feel completely out of step with the speed-focused tone of everything else. The game also has no minimap; you rely on a scanner to find objectives, which is fine for exploration but genuinely annoying during timed competitive missions. There is a built-in level editor for creating custom challenges, and the online co-op lets friends drop in seamlessly, but community population has always been thin and the matchmaking is a gamble depending on when you log on. As a couch co-op or local split-screen option, it is worth flagging upfront: Hover is online multiplayer only, with no split-screen. If your Saturday night crew is hoping to crowd around one TV, this is not the one. For online sessions with friends, the seamless mode-switching is clever, though bugs and connectivity hiccups have caused progress resets for some players over the years. Steam user reviews sit at a solid 81 percent positive across over 1,500 reviews, suggesting the PC version holds up considerably better than the console ports. A controller is the obvious input choice here; this is not a game that benefits from a racing wheel or any specialist hardware, just a standard gamepad and you are good. Hover is an easy game to like from the outside and a harder one to stick with once the novelty of the movement wears off and the thinner mission variety becomes apparent. The chip-based progression grid, where you earn and swap upgrade chips to improve speed, jump height, and agility across up to ten unlockable characters, is functional but dry. The colourful world and banger soundtrack do a lot of heavy lifting. If you have a few friends online who also own it, the chaos of a Gameball match or a group race through the upper city is genuinely a good time. Solo, the experience runs thin faster than it should.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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