To be honest, when I first saw the game "Beach Run", I subconsciously thought it was another skin-changing parkour. After all, there are too many similar products on the market now, such as subway parkour and temple escape. They dare to sell them in a summer setting. But if you take a closer look, you will see that this is actually a free game produced by Nanjing Daifei Network in the 5.0 era. It was an old company at that time, and I felt a little nostalgic.
Not to brag, this game does have its highlights. What surprised me most was the operation method - press and hold the screen to control running, release to brake or jump. This design seems simple, but actually feels surprisingly solid when played. Unlike some parkour games that have a delayed touch or slow response when sliding, the feedback of "Seaside Run" is very responsive, which is especially important on old Android phones. After all, the machine performance of the 5.0 system is limited. Being able to achieve this kind of smoothness shows that the development has worked hard on optimization.
The track design is a plus. There are more than a dozen water tracks, each with a different combination of obstacles: sudden floating bridges, high-speed rotating propellers, and rapids that change rhythm. I remember there was a "Pirate Run" in the early Symbian era, which also had this water theme, but at that time it only had a few fixed obstacles to switch back and forth. The track in "Seaside Run" is more dynamic. Sometimes the reflection of the sun will dazzle you, and sometimes the waves will suddenly hit you. These small details make parkour a lot more tense.
Of course, as a veteran player, I have to find fault. The character modeling is a bit rough, especially when running. The arm swings are too large and look unnatural. In terms of sound effects, there are only simple sounds of waves and treading water, and the background music has almost no sense of existence. And although there are many tracks, most of them are linear advancement, without some branch choices or random events, and it is easy to get bored after playing for a long time. However, considering that it is a free game with no in-app purchases and no forced advertisements, this sincerity is worthy of praise.
While playing the game, I suddenly remembered the days when I secretly played "Doodle Jump" in the back row of the classroom ten years ago. At that time, the memory of mobile phones was only a few hundred megabytes, and the games were Java packages of tens of KB, but each one was played with gusto. The current game graphics are better, but they lack that sense of purity. Although "Beach Run" is not a masterpiece, it at least allowed me to regain the relaxed energy of "just open it and play it, put it down without getting entangled". If you also miss the simple and direct parkour experience, you can try it. It doesn't cost any money anyway. 😌