Giana Sisters: Dream Runners

My honest take after sitting down with Dream Runners for a couch session: the pitch sounds genuinely fun. Four players race through looping 2.5D stages, collecting gems to fill a boost meter, firing power-ups like owl swarms and laser bursts at rivals, and sprinting hard enough to push the last-place runner off the edge of the screen. Winning a round earns a star, and three stars takes the match. On paper that loop is tight, accessible, and perfect for a Saturday night pile-on. In practice, though, a pretty long list of problems gets in the way before you even finish your first beer. The core issue reviewers flagged at launch - and nothing has changed since - is that the movement feels slippery rather than snappy. The sisters carry too much momentum to let you make precise adjustments, and wall-jumping off certain surfaces is basically a guessing game because the game never clearly signals which walls respond to input. Running through a dreamgate flips the level between its light and dark layouts, reshuffling platforms and obstacles mid-race, which is a clever idea borrowed from Twisted Dreams. But the camera pulls so far out to keep all four runners in frame that you often cannot actually read the obstacles coming at you until it is already too late. The power-up roster - place-swapping, projectiles, a mine-laying spring, and those owl triplets - sounds chaotic in a fun way, but multiple reviewers found them easy to avoid and not particularly impactful on race outcomes. Bugs around tie-breaking logic, where the game occasionally awards the win to the wrong player, added genuine frustration on top of the control friction. Content-wise there are nine stages across varied themes (desert, ice, stone ruins among them), four starting characters with more unlockable by placing well, and a best-of-three-stars match structure that keeps individual races short. That short-burst format is the game's biggest practical asset for couch play: someone new can understand the objective in about ninety seconds, and rounds are over before anyone gets bored. The art holds up fine, colorful and readable enough to tell your runner from the pack, and the soundtrack pulls from the Twisted Dreams score, which is legitimately good rock-inflected platformer music even if reusing it feels a little lazy. The elephant in the room for anyone buying this today is online. The servers were described as a ghost town within weeks of launch, and that situation has only solidified over the years. Ranked and Quick Match modes exist, but finding a match has been effectively impossible since the game's early days. If you are buying this for online play, redirect that money immediately. What you are actually buying is a local four-player party game that substitutes AI bots when human bodies are not available. The bots on medium and hard difficulty are, by most accounts, dialed up too aggressively for a casual session, which undercuts the accessibility angle. Solo play against bots drains thin fast. The game lives and dies on having three other humans in the room with you, and even then it sits clearly below SpeedRunners as a genre option. If your specific situation is a regular couch crew who wants something colorful and pick-up-and-play for an hour before switching to something else, Dream Runners can scratch that itch at the right sub-five-dollar price point it tends to sit at. Go in with expectations calibrated accordingly and leave the online modes alone entirely.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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