What is it? An endless racer that has you piloting a sun-fueled aircraft across a futuristic landscape dotted with geometric obstacles that’ll smash you up real good, and shadows that’ll suck away all your solar juice. If the sun goes down, it’s game over.

Who made it and where can you get it? Race the Sun is the latest indie production from the Filippo brothers and their studio Flippfly. The PC/Mac/Linux game is available for $10 at flippfly.com/racethesun and has currently reached 50% approval on Steam Greenlight.

How much did we play? Since launch on Monday, I’ve put in another couple of hours with the full game on top of the time I spent playing the beta for my earlier preview (all my stats and profile data did transfer over). I have reached level 12 (out of 25) on the progression system and achieved a top score right around 900k.

Any technical concerns or hardware requirements you should know about? The game itself runs beautifully, but while using an Xbox 360 gamepad I have occasionally encountered issues with not being able to select certain menu headings using the analog sticks or the interface deactivating entirely unless I use a mouse. The game has also crashed a couple of times, but strangely only when attempting to quit out of the application.

Why should you play it?

• Daily Freshness: As was the case during the beta, the greatest attribute Race the Sun has going for it is its daily supply of new content. Every single day the game refreshes with a different procedurally generated level and a reset scoreboard of high scores to shoot for. After a few days the minimalist style of flat hues and simple level geometry–as visually striking as it is–does begin to blur the levels together with a sense of sameness, but that’s when you turn to the Simplex World Creator to create your own stages or just play those made by other users who may have a stronger knack for level design. The game’s community is never going to reach the heights of something like a LittleBigPlanet and its millions of custom levels to choose from, but already the community seems to be humming along pretty well as there are plenty of fun levels to try and rate, many of which are quite different and much more colorful and abstract than those provided by the developers. The promise of something new to see and play each and every day is a major selling point for sure.

• Unlock This: If the daily level switch wasn’t enough, replay value is further extended by a progression system that keeps you flying after a steady stream of unlocks. By completing specific gameplay challenges – use power-ups a certain number of times, travel a set distance or achieve a specified score total in a single run, collide with a certain number of objects without crashing etc – you will rank up and gain access to some new piece of content, from new modes to additional power-ups to increases in the starting score multiplier to mods that will equip your ship with a magnet to suck up Tris (glowing triangle thingies collected for bonus points) from a distance or maybe even a larger battery pack to maintain power for longer while flying in the shade. You might intend to only play a run or two when you first log on to try the day’s new world, but once you see that carrot hanging from the stick in the form of a new challenge or level unlock it’ll become very difficult to pry yourself away from the flight controls. This is one exhilaratingly addictive game, folks.

• Hardcore Apocalypse: Endless racers/runners are typically viewed as causal fluff for mobile devices, however Race the Sun is definitely built more for hardcore high score hunters. That doesn’t mean that the game is inaccessible or should intimidate less-skilled players; the pick-up-and-play simplicity should be immediately accessible for anyone who can steer a flying vehicle from side to side along a fixed horizontal plane. But to actually master the gameplay and pile up long travel distances and sky-high scores will require quick twitch reflexes, light touch, and a locked-in focus to recognize obstacle patterns and maintain constant awareness of your ship while simultaneously keeping an eye out for what pitfalls lay ahead. Eventually you will also unlock Apocalypse mode, which, on a scale of 1-10, amps the difficulty to about a 15. Seriously, you’ll need mad skillz just to clear a single region as hazards cover a much larger percentage of the terrain and falling meteors create blast clouds that will temporarily block your vision. I barely survived longer than 10 seconds on my first few attempts, and thus far I’ve only just managed to eek into the second region once. Hardcore indeed.

Parting Thoughts: Race the Sun might appear to be a simple casual experience for killing time and work productivity (I can’t say it won’t do the latter), but it really feels like more of a gamer’s game than the endless-running time wasters found in never-ending supply on tablets and smartphones. The game was a blast during the beta and so far is only more fun and challenging now that its complete array of features are in place. If you want a video game you can theoretically play anew every single day until sometime in the apocalyptic future when the real sun crashes into Earth and ends life as we know it, Race the Sun is the game for you.

[Update] As of December 9, 2013, Race the Sun is available on Steam. If you bought the game previously, a free Steam key should be available in your Flippfly account page. I also wanted to update this post to add that any progress made in the original release automatically imports into the Steam Cloud the first time the game is launched, and you’ll even receive retroactive achievements for previous accomplishments.

Indie endless racer Race the Sun, which we previewed for you last month, is officially a go for full launch beginning Monday, August 19th on PC/Mac/Linux. If you’ve pre-ordered already, you can jump into the full game right now and test your flight skills in the newly added Apocalypse mode, the ultimate challenge for masochistic endless racing masters. Check out the new trailer to see what you’ll be up against should you be brave enough to face the Apocalypse.

Talk about coming out of nowhere. Up until last week, I’d never even heard of the Kickstarter-funded Race the Sun. Now, after a few days tooling around at the controls of a solar-powered aircraft in the game’s beta, I don’t want to stop playing.

Race the Sun is a fresh take on the endless runner/racer genre. Think Jetpack Joyride, minus the jetpack and minus the side-scrolling style, in favor of full-on, behind-the-aircraft 3D gameplay. The two games couldn’t look any different, but the endless hunt for the high score mentality is exactly the same.

The objective is the same as any other endless-type game: to guide your sun-fueled ship along an obstacle course of abstract, minimalistic level geometry for as long as you can without crashing or running out of sun juice (going through tunnels or staying in shadows for too long drains the ship’s solar charge). The farther the distance you travel, the higher your score.

Nabbing special pick-ups called Tris as you fly by increases the score multiplier for every five collected. The trick becomes knowing when to take a risk and when to play it safe. That glowy, blue Tri stuck over there between the two blocks desperately teases you to grab it, but if your strafe timing is off—smash!–you’re a goner. Clipping objects with a wing won’t cause a game over, but will send that high multiplier crashing and burning to lower levels.

Completing different challenges (pick up a certain number of Tris, complete 4 regions in one run, reach a multiplier of 15, etc) over multiple runs slowly builds your player level. With each level comes some form of unlock, whether it’s a power-up or a ship upgrade or a new game feature. Thus far I’ve gained access to two power-ups – a jump ability that shoots the ship higher off the ground to fly above all hazards for a short time as well as a turbo boost daylight extender – and a magnet ability that attracts pick-ups to the plane from a distance.

What’s really neat about Race the Sun is its a-new-world-every-day setup. Every 24 hours a new procedurally generated racing level is created for players to race on. For that day, players can try as many runs as they want, and attempt to soar into the top 10 on the leaderboards. After 24 hours, the scores reset and a new world becomes available. Eventually you will also unlock an asynchronous co-op relay mode in which one player starts the race and then posts their leg to a web page or emails their score to another player to continue from. Once four players have each completed a leg, the cumulative score is tallied and posted to a team high score leaderboard. I’m not quite sure if this feature is active yet, though, as no team scores appear when I check the leaderboard. That or the beta community isn’t socially engaged.

Another key component to the game will be the Simplex World Creator, a game editor that allows creative-minded players to customize the layout of their own endless racing worlds and then share them with others. I’m personally not into game modding and level editors, but from what I’ve dabbled with the editor makes it fairly simple to populate a map with objects and dynamic events without any coding knowledge. But again, like the relay mode, either the beta community isn’t very active, the World Creator’s sharing function isn’t fully operational yet, or I am completely missing something, because I can’t find any user maps in the menu other than a couple test samples from the developer.

Race the Sun is on target for a PC/Mac/Linux release later in the summer and is currently up for voting on Steam Greenlight. The beta contains only a small slice of the game and a limited player base, but already the game’s daily challenge format and exhilarating daredevil spirit have me completely hooked. Something about darting through tight corridors, weaving in and out of simple geometric shapes and narrowly avoiding collapsing walls with only a single life just gets the adrenaline pumping.

Obviously an active community that embraces the World Creator and relay social interaction features will be crucial to the game’s long-term viability. However, even in its current beta state, Race the Sun is an addictive and deceptively challenging high score hunt that will suck you in for just one more run, over and over again, until the minutes turn into hours and the hours fly by until the next world is created. Flippfly is on to something pretty special here, folks.

Want to take the game for a ride yourself? Check this out to learn how to enter for a beta key!

Flippfly is clearing the runway for a limited public beta test flight of its slick, minimalistic, procedurally generated, solar powered endless racer, Race the Sun. How awesome does that sound?

Beta access for the PC/Mac/Linux title is being run through GamesRadar, where a total of 5,000 beta keys are up for grabs in a giveaway. I have no idea how many keys are still available at this point, but play it safe and enter immediately to improve your chances of scoring a code.

If you get into the beta and like what you see, you can pre-order an early purchase pack to be ready for the game’s late-summer launch and/or help push the game through Steam Greenlight with an enthusiastic thumbs-up vote.

Want to know more about Race the Sun before boarding the beta flight? Flippfly has a pair of gameplay videos available demonstrating single-player gameplay, the game’s unique relay-style multiplayer, and the powerful Simplex World Creator tools players will be able to create custom levels with.

Check those out here, and then jet over to GamesRadar for a beta key!