Review
Thoughtful steering
by RevStu (October 22nd, 2010 at 12:59 pm)
Though hugely long-awaited, sadly Reckless Racing isn’t very good. For all its glorious graphics (it looks great on normal displays and absolutely gorgeous on Retina screens) and the novel parcel-delivering minigame, it’s far too easy and far too light on content.
You’ll ace every one of its five tracks (plus reverse versions) first time in Bronze medal mode – probably lapping all the opposition in the process, despite most races being three laps and under 2 minutes long – and you HAVE to play Bronze on a track before you can unlock Silver. Then, predictably, you have to wade through them all again on Silver to unlock their Gold races, which are the first point at which the game puts up any resistance and by which time you’ll be thoroughly bored of all the courses and have no incentive to carry on, because there’s nothing left to see or do.
However, RR does deserve huge kudos for one thing, which ought to be adopted by every other overhead-view racing game (and a whole load of other kinds of game too) from now until the end of the time. By violent force if necessary.
Reckless Racing includes no fewer than five different control methods, which is highly commendable in itself, but the particularly brilliant thing is how they’re offered. The first time you play (or any time after that by selecting Tutorial from the main menu), the game puts you on a short test track, which you can mess around on to your heart’s content with no opponents or time limits. At the touch of an onscreen button, though, you can instantly cycle through all five control methods, live.
It’s a piece of genius so obvious and so brilliant it boggles the mind that nobody’s thought of it before. Without a load of irksome back-and-forthing between menus (by which time you’ve forgotten what the previous method was like) you can immediately see which system you’re most comfortable with and which one is best at handling which kinds of corners. Personally I’m most fond of Tank, which auto-accelerates and puts the turn buttons at the corners, but you might prefer Standard (laid out like a traditional joypad) or – if you’re really weird – Tilt.
It’s not just the methods that are selectable either – in the Customize menu you can move the position of the onscreen buttons around to your heart’s content. So if you’re left-handed and want to swap the steering wheel over, or you want to play Tank with both direction buttons on one side and brake on the other rather than in the middle, that’s no problem.
This sort of stuff ought to be Lesson 1 for new videogame developers (and old ones too), and it’s sad that it stands out so dramatically when someone does their job properly. It’s also sad that Reckless Racing isn’t a better game – as it stands, for all the joy of the controls you’ll still have exhausted the £1.79/€2,39/$2.99 game inside two hours. But if for no other reason than making their game so welcoming and pleasurable to play for the short time it lasts, we doff our hats to Pixelbite Games anyway.
I disagree with this. The reason why this is so much fun is because the feeling of it so perfect. Finally it’s an iOS racing game which has controls which make me feel like I’m in charge, and skidding around the corners is incredibly good fun.
Yes, the difficulty level ramp is all wrong. But then there’s multiplayer, and online leaderboards where you can try and perfect your lap times. And since it actually feels like I’m in control, I want to perfect them.
And of course the hope that they sort out the difficulty and add more tracks. With such a gorgeous engine, it would be a shame if they didn’t take advantage of it more. I want a track editor please.
Well, that’s not really disagreeing – I called the game “so welcoming and pleasurable to play for the short time it lasts” and praised the controls lavishly. And you also seem to agree with me about the difficulty and lack of content. A lap-times leaderboard is a poor substitute for a decent amount of challenging gameplay – especially in a week when you can buy GT Racing Motor Academy for a third of what Reckless Racing costs – but if it gets improved in an update I’ll be first in the queue.
I think the game is great, but totally agree that forcing you to play the bronze-courses before playing silver or gold is stupid. Especially since they are so incredibly easy. And the lack of levels is disappointing, would have been a lot more of awesome if it had 20+ levels.
Another thing that annoys me is the framerate. On my iPhone 4 it runs smooths for a short while, than goes in to a really choppy mode for a short times, then goes back to running smooth. Really annoying, but I’m getting quite used to iPhone games having bad framerate or that they stutter from time to time.