VS. Racing for iPhone is the first game from Maciek Drejak Labs and is a top down racer which reminds me of the old school classic Super Sprint.
The game gives you a top down view of the racing track with you and your opponents taking up just a handful of pixels as you race around a variety of tracks that twist and turn around the screen.
The tracks are to scale with the miniature cars but despite their size they provide lots of detail, tricky corners, fast straights and various surfaces that affect the handling of the cars.
The game has a narrative in the single player mode where you play the role of Ryan, a rookie racing driver who you have to bring up through the ranks of five championships on your way to the World Championship Finals.
While the narrative is fun it’s pretty irrelevant to the racing and luckily it doesn’t get in the way of it either. In fact you can move from race to race pretty quickly which means the action keeps coming thick and fast.
You have a choice of controls for your car which includes both touch and accelerometer controls. My weapon of choice was the touch controls which I found very responsive. You only need to worry about steering as acceleration is automatic.
Included with the auto-acceleration is a speed boost which helps you catch up if you are running behind the leader, however this is a double edge sword as this speed boost also applies to your opponents so large leads can be eaten into pretty quickly.
This is no bad thing though as it keeps all of the races exciting right up until the last corner and while this may be a little frustration the speed in which you can replay the race means that you can get your revenge very quickly.
The multi-player options are local bluetooth & wifi and Facebook leaderboards which includes a Ghost Mode so that you can races against your friends ghost cars. These are fun alternatives to the single player mode but GameCenter integration and online multi-player would be nice additions.
If you enjoy racing games of all descriptions you won’t be disappointed with VS. Racing especially if you can grab it while it’s still free. With future free updates also promised this could be a real bargain.
[rating: 4/5]What we like
What to know
[rating: 4/5]
A clever twist on the color matching game.
If you like Tetris and Breaker, you’ll love Popper!
Features:
+ Delicious graphics
+ Tangy game play – twist and turn handset to get more pops!
+ 10 levels of gameplay, each level increasing in difficulty
+ Are you a lefty? Go to “settings” and put the “fire” button on the left!Gameplay:
• press the red fire button to shoot pop
• hit like-colored pops to clear each screen
• clear the pops quickly – when they start to glow red it means they’re about to cross the dotted “die line” at the bottom of the screen.
• when the “bomb” appears to clear loads of pops all at once!
• when the “clock” appears, tap it to gain more time for that level
• when the “rescue ring” appears, tap it to move pops further from the die line.
• when the “+100, +200″ icons appear, tap on them to get more points
Popper is a fun filled and fast paced game which will engage you for a long time to come!
A complete twist on the age old game where you simply fire your object at static colors to match them and make them disappear, this game mixes it up with different modes for each level, from a spinning circle of erm pills (?) to a moving wall and many others. Be warned the game is not very forgiving as the aiming controls are accelerometer based and there’s not even an option for an aiming sight to help you out but if you can get used to the pace and the aiming then this game is a lot of fun. The controls are simple, one button for fire and another for rotation (thoughtfully has an option to flip the controls for left handed users) aiming as previously mentioned is accelerometer based so you have to tilt the device side to side to aim and in keeping with the dynamic nature of the levels the aiming style often changes from level to level, sometimes being locked to the center of the screen others moving along the bottom in a break out block style.
My problems with this game are lack of option to turn off the music, asking to use my location for what reasons I don’t know and not making use of a keyboard when entering your name into the highscore board, relying instead on old school arrows to go through the alphabet for each character.
In future versions I would like to see an option of controlling your aim in a different manner other than tilting your device for the sake of accessibility and more levels.
Price: $1.99
The Good
The Not so Good
Reviewer: TylerDurdan
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