9 / 10
score
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Controls
Control is via one of five methods, standard which has buttons for steering left, steering right, accelerating and braking. Tank mode offers just three, left, right and brake, the idea being hold both left and right to go forward, take your finger off one and you steer the other way, fingers off both to not accelerate at all.

Tilt is as you'd expect, one button for accelerate, one for brake, accelerometers are used to steer. The final two modes are wheel based, you sort of drag the wheel left or right and have accelerate and brake buttons.

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Personally I hate any attempt to put gamepad buttons on a touch screen, they never work well as you lose the important tactile feeling of a gamepad. Tilt works okay for some games, but always seems a bit twitchy and not responsive enough for fast steering. The wheel modes however, they work great, you can really do the fast over-steering required to get your car sliding round a corner and just let go to straighten out. More racing games need to add this as an option!

As if providing these options weren't enough, you can adjust the sensitivity of the wheels and even customise where the touch areas are, so if you find them too big (I'm not sure why you would but hay) you can resize, move and drag away. Excellent touches to keep the most persnickety redneck racing junkie happy.


Multi-player
Clicking on this option lets you find games on the Internet and searches for servers, of which only two showed up, both being based in Sweden. This scared me initially, firstly because being in the UK my ping to Sweden wouldn't be as good as to a UK based server. And secondly because I've been on Swedish servers in racing games before, and Swedes are really quite insanely good at them.

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I needn't have worried, whilst the few races I did were lost, I didn't lose that badly considering I haven't played the game that badly, and the lag wasn't too bad either. But like all internet games, especially ones with collisions enabled, someone lagging around you can knock you off the road. Perhaps one best not done on 3G and limited to a wireless connect.

Once connected to a server you can host your own game or join someone else's, chat to people, play a game or two and then find another game if the opponents of this one are too easy or hard.


Conclusion
With a load of first person racing games on the AppStore, it's nice to have a good old fashioned top down affair like this. It nicely combines retro elements and fun with up-to-date graphics and Internet play. The tracks go from very simple to quite complex, with some fun objects that can be knocked over like lampposts, and some tight chicanes that taking too wide result in a very wet car floating down a fast moving stream.

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Difficulty wise, each level is just right. Gaming newbies will be struggling to win first on Bronze, whilst experienced games will find Gold just challenging enough, and once that no longer presents any difficulty there is always internet play against real opponents.

If I had one complaint it is simply the tracks aren't very distinct in look, everything is pretty much dirt and tarmac. But this is really a very small complaint, I'm getting quite picky here.

This game is great fun, ideal for anyone who loves a nice bit of top down racing, definitely the best the AppStore has to offer at the moment and a bargain at the price of £1.59, let alone the 59p it occasionally is discounted to.


Pros
  • Attractive 3D courses
  • Clever rotating camera
  • Good range of control options
  • Intuitive car physics
  • Three difficulty levels
  • Multi-player
  • Three gaming modes
  • Supports Retina display
  • Supports instant switching (multi-tasking)

Cons
  • Tracks look rather similar
  • Music you soon want to turn off
  • No support for Game Center

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