Desert Child Critic Reviews

Desert Child is utterly unique. It blends the moreish action of hoverbike racing with an amazing DOS inspired aesthetic. It’s a short and sweet racing RPG that plays incredibly well in short bursts. Well worth picking up if you fancy a modernised retro title that does something different.

It's an odd thing for a video game to bank so heavily on its aesthetics, but in the case of Desert Child, the plan works. This isn't a dense game, nor is it necessarily a complex game; instead, it's a simple title that suits retro gaming enthusiasts with good visuals, good music, amusing interactions, and a series of high-speed races.

Grinding for slim rewards during the few hours it takes to finish Desert Child encourages you to think broadly about financial hardship. While that’s a worthwhile topic to consider, the inert world and thin gameplay aren’t enough to translate Desert Child’s core concept into an entertaining game.

Desert Child is stylistically fantastic and has some of the more exciting racing gameplay we've seen this year, but it really suffers from its short length. There's an interesting, colourful world to explore in Olympia, but unfortunately things ends when it feels like Desert Child is just getting started. Still, it's an admirable effort from a talented one-man team.

Desert Child delivers some nice retro-style graphics and a great soundtrack, but the game becomes repetitive and grindy very soon.

Desert Child has a wonderful sense of style, and there are moments when it clicks. When you jet across the water on your bike firing a shotgun blast that shatters several televisions in front of you, or when you first start to wrap your head around the aesthetic of Mars, the game briefly, but brightly, shines. But Desert Child doesn't quite hang together, and by the end of its very brief runtime the things that seemed exciting just an hour prior have lost most of their luster.

Desert Child is built upon the promise of solid ideas that don’t quite come together. And sadly, they’re so deeply intertwined that a mistake in one aspect of the game critically injures the other part of the game. Hoverbike racing is a neat central mechanic but it wears thin and is stifled by its lack of difficulty and useless upgrades.

With a stronger central theme that went deeper than base critiques of the US and its cultures, Desert Child could have been much better. While its got style, it’s disappointing how little it does with it. Races are fine, the world it presents quickly becomes finding the quickest route to reach the end, and once reached it all ends so abruptly you can’t help but begin it again with the curiosity of there having to be something more. In the end, there isn’t that much more to it, and even an easy Platinum trophy on PlayStation 4 doesn’t make this a game I would recommend to anyone.