It’s an interesting take on a choice mechanic, boiling it down to a tactical decision in the moment.
A living bounty requires deft work with your third arm, and the openings for striking with it are few and far between. His corpse won’t get you as much cash, but it’s a lot easier to procure.
But it all starts so promisingly that mark you’re chasing right at the start? You can batter him to death, or knock him out and hand him in alive. Several of them are literally just guys that you punch and run away from for ten minutes. They Always Run is too good for the latter, but gets saddled with it more often than not. The joy is in the analysis figuring out where to strike, when, and what with. It’s not so bad that it will ever make you replay more than a minute of the game, but being sent back more than a few seconds is frustrating when trying to trial-and-error a precision move, and excruciating in the middle of a boss fight – particularly with bosses like these, which are laborious more than anything else. These annoyances are further compounded by the piss-taking checkpointing. On a couple of occasions, Aidan failing to grab a crucial bit of railing, for no discernible reason, at a particularly annoying skill jump. Though none of them are dealbreakers, They Always Run has more bugs than a Russian embassy. Besides, there’s quite enough fannying around going on in the game’s innards. There’s some tricky parkouring to be getting on with in They Always Run, and nobody wants to fanny around when trying to execute a perfectly timed double-jump. But this, as it turns out, is not a bad call.
It’s odd that a game stuffed full of jumping and grabbing, and so proud of the fact that its main guy has three arms, would never put the two together. One can imagine being able to swing from it, or grab out-of-reach ledges, or something, but no. It doesn’t have any use during platforming sections, though, which is surprising. This extra appendage could so easily have been a simple quirk of character design, inconsequential to the player, but the developers seem to relish finding uses for it. Aidan’s third arm, an admittedly dubious sounding gimmick, comes into play as an ace in the hole a defence-breaker, a gun-shooter, and a power weapon that can deal huge amounts of damage when charged. A chunkiness to its animations and a casual looseness to its hit-boxes that makes it simply delightful to, say, clobber three baddies at once and dart away with a dodge roll to avoid a sniper’s bullet. There’s something of the 16-bit era in how it all moves. It’s not what you’d call slick: it’s scrappy and daft. Unfortunately for them, you have three fists, and a personal stake in getting the job done. Making good on the title, his latest mark is fleeing the scene, leaving you at the mercy of his henchmen. Thrown into a job gone awry, bounty hunter and Robocop-helmeted protagonist Aidan starts the game in mid-pursuit. It has the gadgets, and the swagger, but none of the exploring and backtracking. READ MORE: Why ‘Deathloop’ is wrong: meaning and morality within a time loop.
If you’ve always liked the idea of Metroidvanias but never had the patience for them, They Always Run might well have been invented just to scratch your particular itch.