tl;dr: Hover is a fun game but the leveling / chip system really holds it back how confusing it can be, and the lack of playerbase removes an essential component to the game.

Spent a ton of hours in the game, the game's a mix of a parkour platform exploration game with social elements, the game has 3 sprawling levels you can explore and 3 slightly more linear levels Each hub area,outside of the first district is gated behind a ingame rep and story progression, they all contains a ton of missions you can partake in (races, gameball, delivery missions, etc etc) where you gain in-game rep, new playable characters, EXP and stat changing chips (i'll get more in depth about the latter one)

Movement system is pretty free flowing, can be a bit weird to control sometime due to how momentum heavy it is, but there's nothing bad, you can :

• Jump / Flip, Walljump / Wall Flip
• Bounce (fall fast enough and you can convert the momentum into another direction)
• Slide / Wallslide (wall slide fully stalls your vertical momentum)
• Grind (usually faster than running depending on your build.)

Jumping related stuff (wall jumps, bounces) uses up energy, if you run out of energy you get debuffed, getting energy is simple though, you can just slide on the ground/wall or grind, doing air tricks also gets your energy up when the combo ends, once energy's at max you instead get a stat buff until it drops back to the normal level.

• Getting rep EXP and chips, is pretty simple : just do overworld stuff (getting collectibles etc) and missions / when you do well you get more rep, exp and chips, it gets up pretty fast if you just do the story missions.
• New characters are unlocked through doing side content with certain characters, they all have different stat affinity that decides what they're more leaned towards one has higher jump height but gets bumped away further , one has higher overall speed at the cost of air control, etc.

Leveling up is where it sucks, a lot. At first glance there's nothing wrong, with each level up, you unlock a slot on your character where you can set a chip that modifies your stats, each character also has two slots where they have better affinity for the chip:

• Speed (faster ground speed/acceleration)
• Slide ( less slide friction/ faster grind max speed-acceleration)
• Jump (higher jump / stronger bounces)
• Strength (bump strength / resistance)
• Hacking ( hacking higher level containers, more debuffing when someone goes into your tag cloud/ more time needed until a camera detects you/more combo time)
• Pets (basically a glorified chip that isn't affected by the stat chip stalling mechanic, but that you need to feed to get the stat boost)
• Graffiti (cosmetic tag you can spray on a wall)

Simple, 5 problems linked to design decision, 3 major 2 somewhat understandable

1. Overusing one type of chip makes them stall, so you get less stat raise if you use too much of one chip type (not really a major issue, because some builds would be insane.) Second problem is way worse
2. This is the big one, the grind (no not the rail grinding.) there's a gambling system for the chips, where you can go to dedicated places, trade in chips for a chance to get an higher quality chip, not too bad, a bit obnoxious, the part that makes it god awful is how each station can be used up, yes. used up. you can't use it anymore and you have to go search for another, that isn't marked anywhere, there's no in-game map, and they don't show up on your scanner. 3.1 This is the other big one, that makes n°2 really really really really awful, the latest chip you set in the stat grid locks the previous slot in, if you remove anything but the latest chip placed, it's destroyed, making you need to grind through the chip gamba sesh if you need tochange anything in the build, also it's any chip, so the cosmetic graffiti chip can lock the previous one 2.2 Pets, not as bad but enough to talk about, you have to feed it to get the stat boost, and they will eat a lot, and what they eat are a special type of chips that usually don't spawn as much as the normal one, so you need to find special pet food gamba machines. fun.

And you need to go through this multiple times because in the story there's points where you're forced to use a certain character to progress through.

1. The game is confusing. you don't have anyway to track the missions you've done outside of a box on the top left of the hud that tells you what you've done, but only in the particular zone in the map, there's an arrow that display what's the next mission in the quest line, but it disappears if you turn off the game and doesn't re-appear for side-content, even if you replay through the game, leaving you to wander eternally for one stupid 5 sec mission if you want to unlock a character, but didn't do it all in one play session.

While having more depth than the previous stat point allocation system, it can easily ruin the game if you don't have the gumption to wade through the clunky level up system.

Story is a neat backdrop, just a group of gamers wanting to get entertainment legalized again in a pretty fun dystopian planet. Each part of the city are really well detailled and beautiful to go through, personal highlights are the sewers, the prison and district B Music's also neat, most of it is done by Cedric Menendez and there's only 2 hideki naganuma tracks, and they're honestly the weakest part of the OST, which feels a bit blasphemous to say about Hideki Naganuma but it's real.

The game is in it's final state, because the devs basically got swindeled out of the IP by the editor iirc, which sucks a bit, because it's missing stuff like the kickstarter backers (you need to mod the game to unlock the two extra chars and new pet) and the chip issue is enough to ruin the game