Crash Course – Review

Our rating:

By: FUN MINE

Version #: 1.0

Date Released: 2010-04-03

Developer: DFC Games

Price: 0.00

User Rating:

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Asteroids is considered by most to be one of the classics of the early arcade video games. There have been countless variations and clones, some of which have brought really innovation and class to the genre. Crash Course by DFC games is one such asteroid game. Not only is this game pack great looking 3D but also support for 3D glasses for an actual 3D experience.

Crash Course is played on a spherical globe with the usual asteroids that break into smaller pieces when shot. The game quickly throws in an aggressive group of enemies that will beam into your location and begin firing. The game’s dual stick controls work well for strafing your enemy to avoid their fire. Your own weapons can be upgrade to become larger and more powerful and you will need to grab those power-ups as the enemies and asteroids continue to beam in and the playing fields gets more crowded. One thing that I noticed while playing was that on the older 2G and 3G iPhones the frame rate can drop if too many objects show up on screen. This can slow the game down to an unplayable condition. Once the enemies are removed (usually I accomplish this with the use of a nuke item) the frame rate speeds back up.

The game offers three modes: Casual, Arcade, and Training. There is not much difference betweens these modes, except casual lets you pick up where you left off, and training appears to be an easy mode. There isn’t much in the way of actual training, so you are essentially on your own to figure out what everything does. One feature that will be praised by some (and hated by others) is an auto pause when you are not touching the screen. The idea is that if you have to look away from the screen you don’t have to mess with finding the pause button.
 

Crash Course also boasts an interesting feature that adds to its uniqueness. The game has the option to turn on support for 3-D glasses. I have not been able to actually try this feature but while looking at the screen with the color separation it seems like this feature could give an interesting feel to the game. Both red-cyan and green-magenta glasses are supported. Besides the 3-D support, Crash Course also has a variable graphic detail adjustment to support playability on older iphones while allowing for more detail on the 3GS. As I stated above, I noticed an occasional frame rate drop while playing when the playing field gets crowded, but I would venture to guess this was not a problem on the faster CPU in the 3GS.

One last consideration with Crash Course is the future of this game. The game prominently displays that it is created with Unity third party development environment. It has been my experience with Unity built games that they tend to have problems with crashing. Incidentally, I have had Crash Course "crash" (no pun intended) dozens of times before the title screen even loads. This is only a minor annoyance as restarting the app usually proceeds without issue, but it brings up a larger concern. With the change in Apple’s Developer’s Agreement, there is speculation that development environments, like Unity, may be no longer be allowed on the app store. Wether this is the case or not remains to be seen but if it is, we may not see any updates to this game.

All in all this is not a bad game. It is a good example of a classic arcade genre clone that has several features that aim to freshen the experience. If you have some 3-D glasses in the closet and enjoy some asteroid-like action, then you probably couldn’t go too wrong with this game.