Subway Surfers is one of the best-known endless runner games and one of the only titles to reach the impressive mark of 1 billion downloads on Android alone. In 2018, it reached 2 billion across all devices. Developed with the well-known Unity engine by Kiloo and SYBO Games, it is currently available on Poki for browsers free of charge.
With a strong comic element, you are an urban artist using graffiti art to paint on a train inside a subway station. When a guard spots you, he starts chasing you with his guard dog. The goal is to get "as far as possible," with the protagonist dodging obstacles and collecting items.
The gameplay is also typical of the genre on the web: you use the keyboard's arrow keys to move the character left or right, press up to jump, and press down to slide. The first time you play, there is a tutorial explaining the gameplay, but it is quite intuitive.
Several items help you on the adventure, including collectibles such as coins that, at the end of a run, you can exchange for objects such as a skateboard or magnet, or use to unlock new characters. Although the characters only have cosmetic differences, they add even more variety and longevity to the gameplay.
There are also daily and weekly missions that reward you with in-game items. These vary from collecting a certain number of coins or reaching a certain score to collecting all the letters that form a hidden word in the level, among other tasks.
Another point that stands out is the look, which, despite being simple, "gets the job done" and looks good. The entire underground subway-station setting fits the concept of an endless runner perfectly. The sound effects and sounds in general also fit the game perfectly.
Its tremendous success led to an animated series on a YouTube channel, and it ended up becoming one of the most remembered games (perhaps the most remembered) in the endless runner genre. Without a doubt, Subway Surfers will become, or already is, a gaming legend!
