Future Racer: A solid but lacking Wipeout clone.

Hover cars have always been a thing of the future. A what-if to think about while bored at a family gathering. Fortunately, others sought to make this a distant reality by making the racing subgenre of anti-gravity racers. The developers at Assyria Game Studio wanted to jump onboard the bandwagon, and thus Future Racer was born.

THIS GAME WILL BE RELEASED ON DECEMBER 18th.  THIS REVIEW IS EXCLUSIVE BY appVersity.com

The premise of the game is simple: you race three times around the track to try and get first. If you do, you get to unlock another car/spaceship and track. No bells or whistles, just plain racing. While this may be a plus to some, personally it is a negative to me. I enjoy the games where you shoot or throw things at the other players (most notably Sony’s Wipeout franchise). The thing I did like, however, was the design and layout of the game. The menu was easy on the eyes, and easy to navigate. The vehicles all had unique designs instead of a stereotypical spaceship, which was also a plus. The loading art was also beautifully detailed.

The game starts out with one spaceship and one track. Beat that track, and you unlock another spaceship and another level. There are six of each total. After that, the only thing to do is to beat your time, or beat others times. There is no multiplayer function here, which could have made this game a lot more appealing. Instead, the Future Racer offers “AGON Online” (located in the Awards submenu), which is similar to the “Plus+” iPhone and iPod touch social gaming network that is featured on many games. AGON provides players with the ability to compare their times worldwide, nearby, or with friends. It also offers the ability to unlock Awards, similar to Trophies or Achievements. AGON also offers the ability to connect to Twitter or Facebook, which they preface with saying they will not autopost. An appreciated gesture, good to prevent spamming of your colleagues.

The controls of the game were fairly simple. It uses the standard tilt controls to steer the ship. Press on the screen with one finger for gas, two for the brakes if you do not have boost. If you do have boost, two fingers activate it. The pause button is the in center of the bottom of the screen. Warning on the pause button: you have to hit it exactly right. I had to tap a couple times to pause, which inadvertently caused me to ram into the wall. Good thing I was used to it.

The nice thing about these controls is that most other racing games made for the iPhone and iPod Touch have them, so it is fairly intuitive. The steering, however, could have been better. Personally, every time I turned I felt like the spaceship was drifting, which did not make sense to me. More often then I wanted, I found myself driving into the wall.

That segues me into another topic: the gameplay mechanics. You’d think that hitting the brake while rounding a corner would cause you to not run into the wall, therefore going faster. Instead, the brake ultimately slows you down. You are not penalized for hitting the walls. In fact, I encourage it, instead of trying to avoid them, because it will lead you to get where you want to go faster. This did not strike me as something you would want to have in a game.

In the beginning of my career as a Future Racer Racer, I noticed that going around corners was glitchy and often had a delay. This improved quickly after the first lap of the first track, so I’ll chalk that up to the game loading data. The same thing happened when loading the game. At first, it took a while and then crashed before the main screen. Now, after a couple uses, it opens very quickly, ready to go.

All in all, not a bad game. Building off of a genre that is known to get played, no matter how many times it is recreated, is a pretty fail-proof idea. However, there is room for improvement. In the next couple of updates it would be great to see multiplayer, even if it was local wifi multiplayer. That would drive sales up among friends with capable devices. Another possibility would be to add weapons, or to at least make them optional. Finally, to go out on a limb, I would like to see more levels, built into a tournament with more players. Enough said, its a game with a solid base and room for improvement.

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Category: Games