App Review No. 83 Reckless Racing

Strong Points:
Great graphics
Nice control schemes and enough for each style of play
Lots of characters, with varying play styles
Lots of courses
3 difficulties
3 types of gameplay adds even more variety
Addictive
Multiplayers good

Weak Points:
There are some difficulty spikes - especially from silver to gold medals
They don't tell you what play styles each character has
Can't change the colour of the cars except in multiplayer
A story would've been nice
The characters could use some slight tweaks to balancing

Rating: 92%

In-depth Review:

Release Dates:
World Wide: 21st October, 2010

Control Schemes:
Standard, Tank, Tilt, Half Wheel and Full Wheel.

This app is an awesome top down racer and is, in my opinion, one of the best. You start the game with a tutorial which lets you play one of the multiple control schemes. There are five in total and range from the simple buttons to tilt, tank (where the gas is always on) and half/full wheel. You can also put autogas on all control schemes. I use full wheel as I find it the easiest to use.

Next up is the modes. There are three of them: Dirt Rally (race), Hot Lap (time trial) and Delivery (where you have a time limit to deliver objects). Dirt Rally is my favourite mode as it is so much fun to play. The bronze medal is quite easy to obtain with you being quite far ahead of the competition quickly. However, when you get to gold, the competition speed up and you find yourself racing with them all the way to the finish line. While I find the jump in difficulty nice, some may find it a bit of a leap and you will soon find yourself having to retry levels multiple times.

Another thing that the elusive gold medal may force you to change is your car. With the first two medals I normally play as Otis (the default character) as he is fast and handles quite well. However, when it comes to gold, the competition start using dirty tactics, ramming you with their own cars. This is when characters like Otis fall behind as they are just to weak and characters like Floyd (a truck driver) are needed. You can play and win as the other characters but it is a lot harder and more frustrating.

The next mode is Hot Lap and it tasks you with setting the fastest lap for any of the tracks in Dirt Rally. This mode also has its goods and bads. The good is that the laps are fast paced, you can go round as many times as you want (allowing you to build up acceleration) and as always the cars handle extremely well. The bad is that the difficulty spikes are even more apparent here with you soon only able to scrape milliseconds off of silver medals and some cars are obviously suited more to this mode than others. However, as with Dirt Rally, this mode is a lot of fun and that's the important thing. 

The last mode is Delivery. You are tasked with delivering a trailer full of goods to destinations to get money in a new map especially for this mode. There are three time lengths - short (3 minutes), medium (5 minutes) and long (8 minutes). This mode is all right and offers something different although it rewards precision more than speed and drifting which seems to be against what the other modes stand for. The trailer slides all over the place and more than once I've had to stop and turn to make sure the trailer can follow me. 

The multiplayer aspect of the game is good with both Dirt Rally and Hot Lap being available to play. There is minimal lag (at least when I played) which is always good in a gaming world where lag runs rampant even in (and mostly in) AAA games. 

Finally, the graphics of the game are nice and the details (reflections in water, the fences getting destroyed or the posts falling down when you hit them) are great. The music is catchy and fun with nice sound effects for the car etc.   

Conclusion: overall this game is a lot of fun and a game which I have always found myself coming back to so as to have 'just one more go'. 

Thanks for reading, Satamer.

Update: make the app universal so it runs on both iPad and iPhone/iPod