Racer – Review

Our rating:

By: Tatem Games

Version #: 1.3.1

Date Released: 2011-01-06

Developer:

Price: 0.99

User Rating:

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“And we’re driving just as fast as we can, and we’re racing to outrun the wind,” sings the frontman of alternative rock band Anberlin in the first couple of lines of their song, Autobahn. It’s the track I chose, rather predictably, to play in the background the first time I picked up Racer on my iPhone and discovered that the game comes with a handy feature that lets the player build a playlist of songs, which may or may not be related to cars and racing, from the iPod application. But since Racer is, first and foremost, a casual game, this little feature is but an accessory. The main attraction of Racer is, of course, the race.

Except for its slightly stylized game environment, consisting of a straight road populated by a quick succession of racecars and rendered in neat linear perspective as opposed to a plain top view not unlike that of the old-school Road Fighter game in the Nintendo game consoles of yore, Racer couldn’t be any simpler in its proceedings. To control your car you must simply slide your finger across the screen any way you prefer. But since your main objective is to dodge the cars you’re about to overtake, a straightforward left-to-right-and-back-again motion is for the most part quite enough to perform the trick.

What practically begs to be noticed when you move your car is the force feedback that the car exhibits, most obvious when the car is suddenly stopped or its direction abruptly shifted; it’s a brilliant addition to an otherwise already engrossingly brilliant, although dead simple, game.

Racer has four game modes. Normal, ostensibly the easiest to play, only requires you to avoid cars and hang on to your lives (all three of them at the outset, incremented by one for every two thousand points in mileage earned) for as long as you can, for as fast as you can (car speed increases as you level up). Hard is pretty much the same as Normal, except that it’s faster and more crowded. Slalom offers a quicker way to earn points and reach the top of the leaderboard: apart from dodging cars you have to collect stars. Lastly, Career unlocks the initially locked Slalom after a certain number of stages is passed. In this mode you must collect a predetermined amount of stars to advance to the next, more difficult stage, thereby unlocking new car designs to sport.