Slide Stars (Switch)
With the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, so too came the new breed of celebrity known as influencers. While these online celebrities vary in how much their focus is on recommending products or simply sharing parts of their life so they themselves are the brand, the rise of such stars would inevitably lead to situations like Slide Stars, a game entirely populated by these celebrities in an effort to draw in their fans.
Slide Stars is a game about these social media stars riding out across water slide-inspired obstacle courses, and of the twenty influencers featured in this game, this makes sense for at least two of them. Amusement Force’s Greg and Kes are both part of a water slide review channel on Youtube, but the other celebrities featured are a grab bag of personalities from different parts of the online social media sphere. A fair few models, some gaming personalities, and some truly unique choices like Prof. Dr. Freek Vonk who is a globetrotting biologist and Doctor Mike whose online presence involves providing health and medical information in his videos. All of the featured stars are young and attractive, many of them already either in swimwear or having a swimsuit unlockable, but at the same time their in-game versions don’t always look like the best match for their real appearance. What’s more, none of them are voice acted, and while their victory screens after a level can show off a bit of personality, the presence of these celebrities does feel a little hollow. Casting this somewhat wide net of disconnected social media stars can also make it hard for someone who does recognize a few of the faces to even get to their preferred character, the game having a slow unlock process where you need to work your way up to celebrities by playing through stages as people you might not recognize.
There is a direct incentive to play as certain characters as well. While everyone plays the same in regards to how they control during the side-scrolling water ride stages, characters also have three symbols that are meant to represent their typical form of content online. It doesn’t actually matter if their focus is in something like gaming, health, or travel though, the symbol instead essentially working like a key inside levels to open up extra areas or making jump platforms appear so you can grab a collectable or get more air. There is no real reason to pick an inferior celebrity for a stage since the differentiation between them is purely this shallow three symbol system, but at least at first it does hew close to the unlock system, meaning your single default character is a good fit for the first stage and the characters you unlock after can usually have all the symbols needed for an upcoming level. Later in the game it does start to expect you to have done a lot more optional objectives to unlock celebrities down the line if you want to efficiently clear a stage since some level goals aren’t even possible without the right symbol, but since it is already likely you will need to replay these levels simply because stage knowledge is important, it’s not absurd to request you come back later with a better character as well.
The actual action in Slide Stars has you moving towards a level’s end goal by riding atop what begins as a reasonable inflatable pool toy but can become some truly unusual mounts as you start to unlock things. Surfing atop a giant coin isn’t too bonkers nor is swapping out your inflatable flamingo for a big banana instead, but later on you can ride a shark or even climb into a mech, although the moment the mech appears in the level its arms will clip into its body as they move, making what should be a cool unlock into an ugly design that clearly wasn’t a solid fit for the action. For the most part riding atop a rocket or hot sauce bottle will just be unlocked over time as completing stages and their objectives gradually dole out new characters, rides, and costumes, but you can collect coins in a stage as well that can then be spent on variations of these rides and a special costume for your celebrities. If there wasn’t the outside motivation of just wanting to play as the rare online personality you might recognize, this unlock system would be a fairly sound way of gradually dishing out goodies to keep rewarding the player both for simply making progress and for taking the time to grab coins in a stage.
Things get a little unsteady though when the actual gameplay is factored in. Moving whatever unusual ride your influencer finds themselves atop isn’t as clean as it should be. Spinning your character in the air to earn “likes” is also tied to the same control stick that controls forward or backward movement so you might find yourself unintentionally tipping or conversely not spinning when you do want to do a trick. Your character can be unusually fragile at times, some landing with only a slightly tipped ride will send them splaying out and kick you back to the last level checkpoint while other times you can be trying to intentionally crash by grinding your head against the ground while upside down and it will take some time to register. This finicky detection on what can knock your rider off is definitely a problem when a fair few stages provide the medals needed for unlocks as a reward for making it to the end without bailing, and with the control problems it can even be hard to hit the time limit for acquiring speed based medals after you wipe out to something unexpected. Sometimes that wipe out can come from an enemy you can’t even see on screen until they’re already swooping down to strike you, other times in your caution not to get hit by a swinging spider you slowed down like a reasonable person who didn’t want to die and thus didn’t have the speed to pull off the next jump. Water can sometimes give you a push forward with its flow and at other times fight you, and there are moments where you’re on a dry surface and you just need to slowly drift back into some water to hopefully regain the speed needed for a jump ahead. What’s worse is some surfaces clearly aren’t made to handle your ride unless you approach the perfect way, a jump onto a giant octopus at one point being a constant source of wipe outs and woe unless you were tipping just right and had the right speed to land safely on its unusual head. Rather than feeling like a test of precision though, it feels like a finicky bit of experimentation since safe positioning seems inconsistent and flowing water is hardly a consistent surface to land on.
Levels will also contain collectible star shards that often require those affinity symbols to reach if you want to get all five and actually earn the unlocks for collecting them. Luckily the star shards are retained between runs, and the level goal that involves getting a bunch of likes is fairly easy to achieve because of its leniency. You do lose some likes when you wipe out in Slide Stars, but you can also just pull off a dangerous stunt or high jump, wipe out intentionally, take the small like hit, and then repeat it… or even just finish the stage since sometimes the likes boost for finishing, even in a level that took a while to complete, is enough to achieve the goal.
If you do try to focus on just completing a level rather than aiming for the optional objectives you will slowly get the level clear medals. The levels themselves aren’t all that captivating though, that octopus mentioned earlier one of the most interesting hazards and it still ends up a nuisance since it often disagrees with the physics system like smacking the water near to you with a tentacle and sending you flying further than the camera can even follow. There are two main areas to Slide Stars and you can play with a second player to tackle them if you want constant wipe outs since getting too far ahead will automatically force you into a bubble to rejoin the slower player. These areas often have sections that move you at high speed too when the water is really roaring, but often levels will feel rather similar even if their layouts are technically different. The jungle at least moves between natural outside environments and ancient temple interiors, but the swampy area’s odd rural slant has you racing through what looks like a swamp and in the same stage will have you head to farmland. When a stage is memorable though it will often be because of an annoying hazard like a level where you hop between small pools of water between rocks that will likely lead to frequent wipe outs or the inside of a barn where you do a lot of falling downward and hoping the tilting platforms don’t jostle your rider in a way the game deems deadly. Adjusting your angle to land safely, timing your jumps, and picking which path of an option or two available are definitely meant to be the main challenge of Slide Stars and could have worked well enough with conducive level design and consistent detection on when your rider should be knocked off, but many levels feel like they’re just stringing together ramps and landing platforms in barely different ways so even if the mechanics gelled with the intended level of challenge it still wouldn’t really be an exciting adventure.
THE VERDICT: Slide Stars’s concept of high speed water slide rides with a focus on precise landings doesn’t really gel with its rough controls, level designs that are both uninspired and often not conducive to their goals, and odd detection system for if you wiped out or not. The online celebrities featured are silent imitations who don’t always really match their real life counterparts, but locking them behind a gradual progression system that often requires repeating earlier levels or playing as only a specific person even undermines the game’s main hook of playing as an online personality you like. Unlocking new unusual rides or interesting costumes can make playing some of the less punishing levels quick and painless, but it still feels like whatever element of Slide Stars draws you to it will end up being a disappointment.
And so, I give Slide Stars for Nintendo Switch…
A BAD rating. Tidy up the controls so you can at least figure out the precise safe landings needed for different scenarios and allow people to play as the celebrity they like and Slide Stars would be on a path to at least being inoffensive. Brent Rivera is one of the biggest names in the game and requires 52 medals to unlock, which means even if you play through all levels plus the secret level you’ll still need to do many of the optional goals to complete. This necessitates matching the right symbols by playing as celebrities you might not even recognize or even first working your way to unlocking them by replaying levels with later unlocked characters to even grab the required items or have the opportunity to complete level goals. If Slide Stars had kept its circle of stars to a network or specific type of influencer it might be more acceptable to withhold certain celebrities until you’ve played quite a bit of the game, but Slide Stars wants to lure you in with the promise of some online celebrity who probably advertised the game on their social media accounts only for you to find that they’re hard to unlock and even then just a silent virtual doll that looks slightly like them. If you do just treat them as unlockable characters in a video game the progression system isn’t bad though, but the gameplay isn’t there to motivate you to unlock what amount to a set of three symbols that are required for certain parts of a level to even be accessible. When the differences between levels are often the specific placement or ramps or whether an alligator is in the water and can be seen in time to avoid it, the motivation to replay a level just becomes the unlock system rather than any interesting level design, and with your rider sometimes being uncooperative thanks to the controls, you’ll perhaps latch onto the simple levels more since at least when they’re an unambitious sequence of slides you might be able to earn some easy medals.
Slide Stars’s moments like the big octopus stages can show how things will go awry when it injects a little creativity, so it is perhaps for the best that most levels are fairly basic sequences of similar hazards. Some levels can be completed rather quickly because they didn’t have much of an idea guiding their design, so you do at least get a break from more frustrating moments where your rider seems far too prone to just throwing themselves into the water when your angle is slightly off. The main appeal was definitely meant to be the real life personalities thrown into this somewhat silly game concept, but the actual gameplay is too obtrusive to just coast on star power while the stars themselves are just faces on game models with flattering bios linking to their social media accounts. Slide Stars ends up an odd affair where it seems like the stars were meant to pull in players more than the action but the action demands too much attention and thus its flaws impede what small surge of interest could be inspired by seeing recognizable faces in the game. If the gameplay had worked it wouldn’t matter who the stars were, but it seems only star power could save this game with its half-baked physics and stage design, and unfortunately its implementation of those celebrities was just as flawed.