‘Go Sally! – Surfing’: We Played It So You Don’t Have To

There was Kelly Slater’s, then Sunny Garcia’s Pro Surfing, Transworld Surf and even a video game interpretation of the best film ever made, Surf’s Up. The one downside though, is that all of these games of yesteryear require extinct consoles and the willpower to pry your eyes from your phone in order to actually play them.

Luckily, Sally Fitzgibbons, potential World Champion come video game developer has provided us all with exactly what every single person who surfs has been pining for. 

Forget scrolling Instagram, Facebook or even flipping the physical pages of a hardbound book on your morning commute, you can now dial straight into the latest in surfing entertainment…

Go Sally! – Surfing!

Surf the wave, dodge the rocks, grab power-ups, catch BIG AIR and pull EPIC TRICKS

But what sort of epic tricks you ponder? Well luckily, the game features a diverse and eclectic range of high performance, yet realistic manoeuvres.

The 360 kickflip, 720 backside grab, the Christ air, a whale slide and even the coveted ‘Fitzy Spin’.

All of this marketing spin had me more than excited to exceed my data limit and hook into the latest in digital entertainment. 

Would it rival KSPS on the Gameboy Advance? Or could it possibly overtake my fond memories of renting Sunny Garcia’s Pro Surfing from the now deceased Blockbuster video store? 

The only way to find out was for me to play it.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite what everyone who loves a good surfing video game would’ve hoped for.

In terms of relevance to surfing it’s somewhere between ‘Subway Surfer’ and paying for a Swellnet Pro subscription. And in terms of entertainment, it idols between swiping right to every single person on Tinder and surfing Bondi on a Sunday. 

Anyway, I didn’t want to let that three dollars go completely to waste, so here’s a review of the latest in entrepreneurial and application design. 

A nice, deep bottom turn is the key to longevity in the real world and Go Sally! – Surfing

I started off like any normal person playing a game and dove in without any consideration of the purpose or the controls. Luckily for me, the only possible control the game has is touching the screen with one finger. Essentially, it’s like Flappy Bird. You hold the screen to make Sally highline or let go when you want her to slide down the double overhead, never-breaking face. 

I therefore ran with the immediate approach of trying to do airs by going low and then hunting for the lip, but that approach evidently doesn’t work around here. 

Kelly and Sunny may have let you do airs whenever you wanted, but Sally isn’t like that, you see, to do an air here you need to collect all five letters of the magical aerial word.

‘SALLY’

Once you’ve collected the five magical letters, Sally the surfer will pin it to the lip and prepare for takeoff. You hit a few pop-ups on the screen and before you know it Sally’s pulling 720 handstands, double frontflips, and all sorts of absurdities I can’t remember the name of.

We didn’t realise Sally was giving Zoltan the kickflip prince a run for his money.

And that’s not it either.

As the game rolls on, your down the line speed increases making it harder to stay on two feet, unless you’ve purchased an expensive bubble shield or maybe even chipped in enough to jump off the back of some hooligans ski.

Collect some floating coins, dodge buoys, avoid the Goldy locals on their jetski’s and in the process save a few trapped marine animals by running them over with your thruster!

I wasn’t good enough, nor patient enough to progress beyond the fifth level of this game, but the 15 minutes I did play were enough for me to conclude one of two things. 

1 – 20-something-year-old male surfers aren’t the targeted demographic for this game

OR

2 – It’s awful.

Anyway, if you hate your time and money, then head to the app store, blow $3 bucks and see if your patience and skill set can beat my highscore of 212738!

Comment of the week goes to anyone that can surpass this record breaker.

You might even be good enough to save up for prestigious surfboard shapes such as the ‘Prince Of Whales’, ‘Barely Regal’ or maybe even the ‘White Pointer’ which comes with the added bonus trick, ‘boardflip 1080 spin’. 

Overall, Sally’s non-endemic efforts garner a 3/10, however, I am willing to negotiate the score if there’s a little bit of endorsement coin flying my way – or at the very least a reimbursement for the time and money lost while playing.