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Desert Child
In Desert Child, you are a young and talented hoverbike racer who needs to figure out how you can scrape enough cash together through racing and odd jobs to punch your one way ticket to the Red Planet to enter the biggest race in the universe, the Grand Prix.
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Desert Child Reviews
Professional reviews from gaming critics
Desert Child strikes is a fun indie title that balances being a racer, a RPG, and being unconventionally cool.
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. It's a short adventure, one that's clearly meant to be combed over through multiple sessions, but that doesn't take away from its charm. Desert Child certainly won't be for everyone, but players who approach the game without expectations will be treated to a ligh...
At its best, Desert Child captures the feeling of working toward a big dream while struggling to even buy your next meal. Unfortunately, those moments come sandwiched between a lot of repetition as the initially fun races become a chore that you have to do over and over again. Desert Child's unique setting, filled out with great art and a killer soundtrack, is fun to explore for a while, but the game runs out of gas a little too quickly.
Desert Child is pretty special. Stylistically, it’s a magical experience, its ‘90s adventure game art style mixing well with an absolutely fantastic soundtrack. Set on Olympia, a city on a fully-colonised Mars, in a not-to-distant future, its world is an intoxicating mix of cultures, from Aussie beach bums to Middle Eastern markets.
Just Deserts.
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.