Shred It! Review

Shred It! is a gorgeous-looking endless runner set in a delightful papercraft world of snowboarding. It’s a shame that there’s not much to it, though. It’s a fairly basic game underneath that beautiful shell.

Starting out, there’s a choice of two snowboarders. What you pick only affects the look and gender of your chosen persona, with no sign of any stat boosts here. That’s a trend that continues with Shred It!, solely focused on visual changes rather than anything more substantial.

Controlling your snowboarder is a matter of tapping left or right on the screen, plus swipes up or down for jumps and ducks. It’s the typical Temple Run formula but it’s not as accurate. At times, Shred It! is a bit unresponsive, not reacting to your swipes upwards in time. Lack of multitouch support doesn’t help here, leaving you feeling more restricted in what you can accomplish. Such a simplified control system also means that there’s no tricks to perform - something that would have really helped in such a colorful game.

There’s also the issue of having a reason to keep playing. Unlike so many other titles within the genre, there are no missions to complete or objectives to aim for. Shred It! is all about reaching a new high score and nothing more than that. You can collect paperclips to put towards new costumes and snowboards, but these are purely visual rather than offering any significant benefit. New characters can be unlocked too, again changing the look of Shred It! but nothing more than that. In each case it’s a pretty expensive process, requiring plenty of grinding to get anywhere.

With style over substance being the predominant theme here, Shred It! might look beautiful but it’s not enough to really grab your attention for any length of time. For free, it’s still worth a download to gaze at its delights, but don’t expect to be coming back for any extended sessions. There’s not enough here for it to get under your skin.