This tricky racer plays like Evel Knievel at his evilest
It didn’t surprise me to learn that Hello Games got its idea for Joe Danger from an old wind-up toy. You play Joe, a washed up Evel Knieveltype character trying to catapult his potbellied form back to stuntman superstardom. You race along a single plane on a tiny motorbike, performing tricks between jumps, bounce pads, and deadly pits to power up your blue plasmic exhaust-fart speed boost power. It’s a fiendish and demanding rhythm game dressed up as a Pixar comedy short, rich with accessible Saturday morning appeal. As if it was a child’s toy, I immediately wanted to pick Joe Danger up and play with it.
The original wind-up toy belonged to Hello Games artist Grant Duncan, who rescued it from his parents’ attic. He and three friends had fled big-budget development at studios like EA and Criterion to make something on their own. They started prototyping ideas with figurines, and the little pull-back-and-go motorcycle man caught their imagination. Before long, they were making ramps out of books and firing their wind-up toy at the annoyed faces of the telephone company salespeople who shared their office. “We always knew the type of game we wanted to make,” game director Sean Players will be able to create and vote on each others’ levels in-game.
Murray explained. “Something that was bright, colourful and vibrant, but also had depth. Mario is this really cheery game, but it’s such a hard, skillful game.” Mario never had to wrestle a bike through a minefield at 50mph, however. I tried a few high-difficulty tracks and was still completely absorbed 20 minutes later. YouTube is full of videos of frustrated players trying to conquer the toughest tracks in the Xbox version. Now, free of console exclusivity deals, Joe Danger (and its sequel, Joe Danger 2: The Movie) are finally coming to PC with new features. The level editing system that lets you plop obstacles into an environment and instantly playtest them existed in the console versions, but the PC version will have Steam Workshop support.
Players will be able to create and vote on each others’ levels through an in-game portal to the Workshop. If JD builds a community on Steam, it could last forever. The PC version also lets you race against your own ghosts, and share ghosts with friends. Both games support Steam’s Big Picture mode, making it easy to play on a flatscreen TV—a setup that Joe Danger is perfectly suited to. The first game is all about Joe on his bike, trying not to die; the
second adds dozens of characters and vehicles, and has a chaotic multiplayer racing mode that’s perfect for parties. A great game for kids, it also has enough depth to challenge hardened Trials experts. The PC deserves
more games like Joe Danger
