Sprinter 2

Most running games in a browser give you a hundred metres and a long straight to recover from a bad start. Sprinter 2 gives you half that. Every race is 50 metres, the line is in sight from the blocks, and the only thing between you and it is how quickly you can keep swapping two keys.

Left arrow, right arrow, left arrow. Those two keys are the whole game on a keyboard. We tried A, D, Space and the up and down arrows as well, and none of them moved the runner. On a touch screen it is the same idea, with one tap on each half of the screen. There is no run button to hold down. When your fingers slow, the runner slows too.

What turns that into more than a finger test is what happens between races. Every race pays coins, even a lost one, and the coins buy two upgrades called Max Speed and Acceleration. The computer runners get quicker as the race number climbs. Around race seven they start beating a player who has not bought anything.

Sprinter 2 is published by CD Games and was listed on GameMonetize on 8 March 2021. It was built with Construct 3 and designed for a phone held upright. On Y8 it has been played 122,839 times, with 3.5 stars. We ran eleven races on a local copy with adverts blocked, one of them with a touch screen emulated in the browser.

Fifty metres is a real race, and a brutal one

The 50 metres is a real athletics event, but a rare one. It is run indoors, outside the championships, and mostly by athletes who are really 100-metre runners. The men's indoor world record is 5.56 seconds, set by Donovan Bailey of Canada in Reno on 9 February 1996. The women's record is 5.96 seconds, by Irina Privalova of Russia in Madrid a year earlier.

Those times explain why the distance is so unforgiving. Nobody reaches full speed and cruises; the whole race is the start and the push to top speed. A stumble in the first strides cannot be made up later, because there is no later.

Sprinter 2 keeps that shape, even though its races last much longer than six seconds. In our games a race took between 15 and 30 seconds of key presses. The finish line is always the same 50 metres away, so the difference between "Completed!" and "Failed :(" comes from keeping the rhythm the whole way. Once the rivals get faster, the upgrades decide how much your rhythm is worth.

Where the coins go: two upgrades and nine runners

The two purple buttons under the track are the only upgrades in the game. Max Speed and Acceleration each start at level one for 5 coins. After one purchase each showed level two and a price of 20 coins. We did not measure how much faster each level makes you. The names suggest top speed and how quickly you reach it, which in a 50-metre race are nearly the same thing.

Coins arrive after every race. Ours paid between 16 and 70 for a win and between 23 and 46 for a loss, so the amount is not simply "more for winning".

The cart opens a shop with nine runners. The first is the plain runner in a purple top. The other eight are locked and unlock one at a time, chosen at random, for 600 coins each. A green button offers 500 coins in exchange for watching an advert, which is the fastest way to fill the shop. Runners change how you look, not how fast you run.

Which sprinter game is this?

Search for a sprinter game and you will find at least three different games with almost the same name, and Sprinter 2 is the third.

• Sprinter by Gamedesign, a Japanese studio. This is the Flash-era classic, a 100-metre race on two arrow keys with flat, simple graphics. It is the one most people remember from school, and CrazyGames runs it today through a Flash emulator.
• Sprinter by RHM Interactive, a 3D version made with Unity and uploaded in March 2020. It is the one twoplayergames.org shows. The same publisher later made Sprinter Heroes, a 100-metre tournament across seven continents.
• Sprinter 2 by CD Games, this game. It has a different engine, portrait-style art with outlined cartoon runners, 50-metre races, upgrades and a shop.

The "2" and some of the wording on its listing point towards RHM's Sprinter, and the code even calls the starter by the Turkish word for referee, as Sprinter Heroes does. But RHM does not list a Sprinter 2 anywhere we could find, and the game is credited to CD Games. So it follows the idea of the earlier games, but nobody has confirmed it as an official sequel.

Playing Sprinter 2 unblocked, on a Chromebook or a phone

Sprinter 2 is one page in a browser tab. There is nothing to download, no extension and no account, so it runs on a locked-down school Chromebook as long as this page itself opens. Whether it does is up to the school's network filter, and no game can change that.

It is also light work for a modest laptop: flat sprites on a flat track, with none of the 3D rendering that makes some games stutter on school machines. On the page it fills a landscape window by showing more of the track, and in our 800×600 test nothing was cut off.

On a phone, the game marks the left and right halves of the screen as touch zones, and an emulated tapped race played through to the finish. The layout was clearly made for a phone held upright. GameMonetize itself does not list it as mobile ready, so treat the phone as likely rather than promised.

More running games

If the two-key sprint suits you, Sprinter Heroes runs the full 100 metres over eight lanes, with a second player on the same keyboard. Athletics Hero adds the javelin and the triple jump to the 100 metres. Idle Sprint Race 3D turns running into rapid clicking with a limit you must not push past. Everything else with a finish line is in our sports category.

1. Press the yellow play button on the title screen. The race screen opens with a coin counter, the race number and the two upgrade buttons.
2. Press an arrow key or tap the screen to start. A referee in red raises a pistol and the game counts READY, SET, GO.
3. Alternate left and right as fast as you can keep a steady rhythm, or tap the left and right halves of the screen in turns.
4. Cross the 50-metre line. The screen says "Completed!" or "Failed :(", and shows the coins you earned.
5. Press CONTINUE for the next race, or the cart to spend coins on runners.

Tips from our eleven races:

• Buy the upgrades early. The first level of each costs only 5 coins, which is less than any race pays. The second costs 20. Without upgrades, our test runner won the first six races, needed a second try at race 7, and then lost race 8 four times in a row.
• A lost race is not wasted. You still get coins, between 23 and 46 in ours, so a few failed attempts pay for the next upgrade.
• Rhythm beats bursts. There is no clock, so stopping costs you places but never ends the race. A pace you can hold for the whole 50 metres works better than a sprint that fades.
• Do not bother with the other keys. Only the arrows count. If you are sharing a keyboard, the other person cannot join in on A and D.
• Save the 600 coins for last. A new runner is only a different look, and the shop picks it at random.