TouchArcade.ru

Flight Control Rocket [$.99] is beautiful. The art is pyrotechnic: the groovy colors are sharp and detailed, betraying no fuzz, gloom, or jagged edges on the new iPad. Even the menus have flair. Created intricately to reflect the swinging sci-fi themes that the rest of the game is so gleefully entrenched in, they’re a pleasure to plumb. The on-screen antics feel just as good, as Firemint has iterated on the core design in really fresh ways. But, it’s a shame that all of this is wrapped in the stench of corporate influence. Some of the most interesting additions to the core play model are rendered meaningless courtesy clumsily handled free-to-play functionality.

The sci-fi influence, outside of the slicker and more vibrant visual appeal, is just a fun contrivance to push the series’ usual conceit: take a ship, plot a course, and then repeat until the screen is so full of ships, that it becomes impossible to not avoid a mid-space collision. New features include a fascinating variety of ships with abilities, all of which refreshingly change up the pacing. There’s 15 new ships in total, including a snake-like series of ships that coils as you move it, a ship that splits into two, and even a new drop-ship type that spits out smaller ships into the playing area.

The new ships also feel like stopgaps, designed specifically to keep you from developing a rhythm or from zoning out. Flight Control is usually just an effort in concentration; but with these, it is becoming a much more viable strategy game. There’s enough content on a micro-level now to warrant focus, forethought, and tactics.

To its credit, the action stays manageable despite the varying seeds, sizes, and the abilities of certain ship classes. In part, this is because the action feels a hair or two slower, but there’s also a new health component that allows for a couple of hiccups along the way, whereas the previous game just ended after one collision. It also doesn’t hurt that this series remains a breeze to play: tap and trace, that’s it.

A not-so-clever IAP system sours all of the good vibes these parts of the experience can offer. As you play across the game’s two modes, endless and a time-based survival mode, you’ll earn pieces of optionally purchasable in-game gold. You can use this, in turn, to buy robitic avatars that grant specific bonuses during play. The starter robot randomly ratchets up the score of a landed ship, for example, while others bump up gold earned or grant you extra lives. These sound neat in theory, and they would be totally fun adds if (a) they weren’t saddled by egregious IAP loops, and (b) weren’t laughably expensive.

In order to use a robot more than three or so times, you need to spend in-game gold on the batteries to power them. IAP loops consistently strike me as beyond tacky, and in this situation, they’re rigged in the game’s favor. Also, my mental math says it’ll take me at least a dozen hours to obtain one of the top-tier robots without spending any dough, which is especially silly considering this game costs real money to begin with. It’s sad. The robots idea is a casualty of a crazy business model that is too aggressive, too Facebook-y to take seriously. It’s a big, black eye instead.

Minus the free-to-play shenanigans, Flight Control Rocket is easily the best entry in the series so far, as it sports a lot of fresh and fun ideas, as well as a groovy new theme that Firemint fleshes out splendidly throughout. It’s also one of the best looking new iPad games. But, the free-to-play components do exist, and they keep the experience from feeling like a cohesive whole. This game is split into parts, as a result, and the bad has a habit of putting a damper on the good.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

If you’re familiar with our sister site AppShopper, you’re likely all over the various search and RSS functionalities of the site. If you’re not, I go over a few neat tricks in a post from Labor Day on how to find games on the cheap or even free utilizing AppShopper. Well, AppShopper has another trick up its sleeve, making it easy to find new games and apps that have been recently updated to support the Retina Display of the new iPad.

Check out these two searches:

• iPad games updated with Retina support.
• All iPad apps and games updated with Retina support

Those two links are updated as close to real time as Apple allows, and they can be subscribed to in your favorite RSS reader so you can always stay on top of what is being released. Pretty snazzy, eh?

[source]

New Scientist is reporting on a study by Purdue PhD computer science student Abhinav Pathak on energy usage in free mobile games. If you browse around Pathak’s site, he’s spent his time building all sorts of in-depth debugging tools to really nail down where your battery is spent on different functions inside of a mobile application.

The findings aren’t surprising:

For example, in Angry Birds only 20 per cent is used to display and run the game, while 45 per cent is spent finding and uploading the user’s location with GPS then downloading location-appropriate ads over a 3G connection. The 3G connection stays open for around 10 seconds, even if data transmission is complete, and this “tail energy” consumes another 28 per cent of the app’s energy. …Read More

Angry Birds isn’t alone in this phenomenon, as basically any free game that’s serving you ads is doing all sorts of battery-burning stuff in the background to constantly fetch the newest and (hopefully) most relevant advertisements for you. Again, this might be one of those “Well, duh” sort of stories for a lot of people out there, but it’s just another fantastic example in that even though the price of a free game might technically be zero dollars, even without IAP, you’re “paying” for that game in other ways– Often at the expense of battery life.

[via New Scientist]

[source]

It takes a lot to make a match three stand out these days. If anyone has what it takes, though, it’s the dream team of Launching Pad Games and PikPok. Monster Flip [$0.99] is developed by the former and published by the latter, and that pedigree shows. It’s a slow burner, but invest a little time and you’ll start to see why it deserves your love.

Monster Flip isn’t the same ol’ gem swapping game. The clue is in the title: these little dudes need to flip. Swipe your finger over a line of three or more and they’ll flip over and swap positions. If this happens to line up at least three matching monsters, then score. It’s a bit of a trick to wrap your head around the flipping, but that’s just the challenge of the first few minutes. Once you have that under control you can start to pay attention to the little things. Like how quickly your score gets out of hand when you chain a few matches in a row. Or how steaming mad monsters are more than just a hassle.

Sometimes the monsters get angry, you see. It happens more and more as you progress deeper down the rabbit hole. Six turns after spawning a mad monster will throw a game-ending tantrum, so you have to stay on top of matching and clearing them. But here’s the rub: the longer you leave them, the more they’re worth. Want to truly dominate the leaderboards? Clear mad monsters on their sixth and final turn as often as you can. It’s a huge risk, but the rewards are astronomical.

Classic mode is chill; you can take all the time you want to strategize and plan your attack. You can see the next row of colors that will drop, so triggering upcoming chains is one varsity-level strategy. If you’re not into relaxed, thoughtful experiences you can check out Countdown, which pits you against a two-minute timer.

But the real fun is Sequence mode. There, you’re given the exact same board as everyone in the world and 50 moves to make the most of it. Theoretically, there should be a perfect game out there to be played, and if you’re really, really good, you could be the one to play it. That’s the bit that gets my motor running.

If that’s not enough, you can play a whole other way in Puzzle mode, striking out to clear each of 60 boards with increasingly more complicated layouts. Launching Pad has been generous with the unlocks so you should never get stuck—if you do, there’s IAP available to unlock them all.

So with all that we have a matching game that’s clever and surprisingly strategic, one that has a lot of content to work through and several ways to play. But that alone wouldn’t make this game. What makes it is the positively adorable art and soundtrack. Jeramiah “Module” Ross is responsible for the music. You might remember his work from Monsters Ate my Condo, and he hits it out of the park here too (albeit in a slightly calmer way). In fact, all of the game’s sounds are great. I keep poking the monsters just to hear ‘em squeal.

When you get right down to it, Monster Flip is yet another matching game. If there’s absolutely no room in your life for yet another one of those, you’re not going to swoon over this one. But if there’s any part of you that craves those drop and match combo chains and the increasingly ecstatic chirps and score-splashes that accompany them, this is where you’ll want to look. Not convinced? Swing by our forums and share in the lovefest.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

Azkend [Free / HD] took me by surprise—a gem matching/hidden object game that devoured my hours and my phone’s battery until I’d burned through everything it had to offer. After that, Azkend 2: The World Beneath [$2.99 / Universal] shouldn’t have been much of a surprise, but it was.

Trouble is, the surprise wasn’t good. The bones of the game are still there, and it’s prettier than ever with Retina graphics. But where the original sucked me in so hard I forgot to put my phone down until it was done, I keep dropping the sequel in frustration.

All the elements are in place. This game, like its predecessor, is split into two parts. The first is a matching puzzle where you chain identical icons together to flip a hex grid board. The second is a hidden-object style puzzle where you match small segments of an image to their positions in a larger landscape. The two intertwine in a sweet and simple adventure story.

In Azkend, the matching game was a blast. The chaining mechanics allowed players to set up and execute outrageously long chains, something I found super satisfying. Powerups were unlocked bit by bit and expanded your capabilities like crazy. The powerups made it back into Azkend 2, but the satisfaction is gone. The board layouts are painfully constricted. Long chains aren’t usually possible, no matter how carefully you set them up. In fact, there comes a point when you’re lucky if you can make chains at all.

No joke, about a quarter of the way through the game I began to run into levels where the board would shuffle with no moves left, I’d make a single move, and it would shuffle again. This kept happening. At first I thought I’d forgotten how to play effectively, but when there’s only enough room on the board for one or two matches in a row you just have to accept that something’s gone terribly wrong.

As a result, most levels are an exercise in tedium. You rarely get to set up great chains or plan ahead to set off tesla coil explosions. You hunt down the single match that’s hiding on the board and pray that when it shuffles you’ll be blessed with a setup that works. There’s simply no room to strategize.

This doesn’t mesh well with the new goals that have been scattered throughout the Adventure mode levels. Each of these goals requires you match things in unusual ways. Fog and fire can be cleared by matching adjacent tiles (and fire spreads if you don’t succeed), bugs get hurt by matches and lightning, flowers need to be matched before they lose their petals, and everything is on a tight time limit. That would all be great if there were room for strategy, but instead it just makes survival even more of a struggle.

The hidden object sections are lovelier than ever, with pretty, animated vistas, a robust soundtrack and passable voiceovers. And there are other ways to play. The Time Challenge mode is super fun—it’s a race against the clock to clear wide-open boards over and over until the timer runs down. It reminds me of the good old days. You can also play through the game’s levels a second time for timed awards in the Medals Challenge mode.

It’s hard to recommend Azkend 2 in its current state. The board layouts are too frustrating, and the game never opens up enough to make the struggle worthwhile. It’s a simple problem in a game that would otherwise be excellent, but it’s also an insidious one. It’s hard to get past levels that just aren’t any fun, you know?

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

On this week’s episode of The TouchArcade Show, we return to our respective caves in order to deliver you the hottest and best in iOS… but not before we discuss the fun we had at GDC 2012. When the train gets on the tracks a little later, we bust out some good and, hey, maybe even thoughtful conversations about Mass Effect: Infiltrator, the Dark Meadow drama, and the new iPad.

Listening is easy: just click on one of the links below. If you’d like to subscribe so you can get our latest shows the second they hit the Internet, you can totally do so via iTunes and Zune Marketplace. This is, by far, the best way to listen to us.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-043.mp3, 37.3MB

Here are your show notes:

GAMES

• Mass Effect Infiltrator [$6.99]
• Super Lemonade Factory [$.99]
• Final Freeway 2R [$.99]
• Azkend 2 [$2.99 / UHD]

JARED’S KITTY KORNER

• iCatch Cats [$.99]

FRONT PAGE

• ‘Dark Meadow’ To Remain Paid App, F2P Version Now Happening
• New iPad Benchmarks Points To Double Performance
• Double Fine Adventure Funding Drive Closes

Fireball SE, $0.99 Smooth controls, explosive action, and thrilling escapes. Fireball Special Edition is an intense object-avoidance game from Radiangames, creator of the award-winning Super Crossfire. Dodge huge swarms of enemies across 3 modes and 18 unique stages. Use Meltdown mode to slow down the action and create your own near-death experiences.

Fireball Special Edition, for iPhone and iPad, is available right now in the App Store for a special introductory price of $.99 through March 22 and for $1.99 after that.

[source]

In another world during another time, roving bands of mercenaries die with staffs and swords clutched in grimy, blood-stained hands on epic quests to seek out fame, fortune, glory and honor. Also, tax relief — precious, precious tax relief. Kameloot’s king has pumped up the tax on gold to unbelievable levels, but he’s offering a way for cities to opt-out. It’s called the “Grand Gossip Notoriety Prize,” and the competition in the kingdom is getting stiff as heroes of all shapes and sizes, as well as bandits, monsters, and other various bump-in-the-night stuff, vie for the break.

It’s this not-so-subtle lighthearted edge that gives Digital Tales‘ Battleloot Adventures its legs. It has all the usual tropes, including the classes, items, and structure, of a 16-bit era RPG, but it put a lot of weight behind them. It knows that swords, zombies, wolves, claymores, and magic are as tired as the M4 is becoming, so it focuses on the fun inherent in playing a fantasy game instead. Things like loot, combat mechanics, and art design are what it leverages.

This easygoing attitude is sinuous, as it winds and curves and penetrates into basically every aspect of the experience. The world of Kameloot feels playful; cities and castles are bubbly and inviting, while backdrops are sketchy and bright. Even the weapons and armor and the characters of this world reject straight lines and sober tones. Everything is goofy — even if that thing is trying to squash your head into bite-sized pieces. Check out that screen and you’ll see what I mean.

Having your head squashed is an unfortunate side effect of not taking battle seriously, by the way. At its core, this is a strategy RPG that, like others in the genre, isn’t afraid to be punitive when you make a bad choice. Damage in combat is largely dictated by a rock, paper, scissors style of balancing. Pit rock against paper and you’ll feel a bump or two a couple of turns down the line, guaranteed.

Parties consist of three fantasy warriors, each of which has a specific color and class. Battles are fought in instanced zones freely picked from the world map. Generally, you’ll be fighting against three or four others. Some battles have multiple phases, and there aren’t stat refreshes between them.

Digital Tales subscribes to the Keep It Simple philosophy. Tap on an enemy to attack. Touch a UI element to activate an item or special power. Tap on yourself to defend. It’s a miraculously simple setup, but that doesn’t make the strategy simple. What looks to be this game’s greatest accomplishment is how much has been streamlined into the background. Stats like strength and dexterity still guide a character’s abilities and there’s some degree of dice-rolling when it comes to negative spells, but you never really have to interact with this stuff. There’s also a lot of automation in battle. Healers, for example, automatically heal at a turn’s start, while rogues automatically throw accuracy decreasing potions.

“We wanted to move away from the typical, number-crunching world of core RPGs and reach for players who would still enjoy the pleasure of managing their party of adventurers without worrying about hit chance percent or armor coefficients,” Digital Tales’ Andrea De Siena says. “We tried to make combat more about choices than maths by streamlining such elements as stats, damages and special skills.”

“We wanted to entice both casual gamers and RPG aficionados alike with a simple yet strategic combat system, where you’re free to focus on what you like most: if you’re a newbie, you will easily jump in but you won’t be able to simply button-bash your way to the top; if you’re a seasoned RPG veteran, you will enjoy some well-deserved gameplay depth, mastering the edge system, energy management and talent and equipment choices.”

“Do you think that’s an ambitious mission statement? It probably is, but we’re not afraid: we have robot chickens, pumpkin-men and sheep-bombarding gryphons under our belt,” it jokes. I’ve seen a robot chicken and I can confirm that it is glorious.

Defending has an interesting price: it lowers an energy bar. Energy guides the action-y components. With energy, for example, you can attack enemies with several party members at the same time. Energy usage also closely ties into the “star” system. If you pull off a big combination attack, you’ll be rewarded with a star that can then, in turn, be used to activate big-time class-specific abilities.

The combat doesn’t feel as fluid as Digital would like. It’s still turn-based, so there’s a degree of sluggishness inherent with this kind of design. But battle does operate rather without any hassle on your end. The fighting in general, actually, seems as sweet as a chocolate, and it keeps me playing more so than the loot component, which in most RPGs that stress gear and new items like this one does, always ends up providing the actual fuel. It’s nice to see combat take the front stage for once.

Speaking of loot, expect to get plenty along the way. As you level up, more and more items that match your level unlock. Winning fights earns you coins, and you can spend this change buying these unlocked items. Special “guild” missions unlock new items as well. Rich swathes of UI and tons of equipment, like rings, swords, armor, and shields, as well as hates, should keep the collector busy. This is also tied to an IAP system, but I get the impression that it’s just there for people who don’t care for grinding.

Most of the world navigation is just cut-and-dried, task-focused stuff. Find an open zone, jump into battle, and then repeat. Later in the game, after a hefty tutorial, you get introduced to a more political component: guilds. When with a guild, you get certain bonuses, and you can freely switch between them as the story unfolds and the fights get nastier and nastier. In my short time with the game, I didn’t get to experience this as much as I’d like. I’ll be stoked to see it in action when the retail version hits.

In all, actually, there seems to be a lot to like here. Most fantasy games get so into themselves, so muddled in their own goop, that it can be hard to see what separates them from the rest of the pack. Battleloot is different. It wears everything on its gleeful, not doubt dapper, sleeves. It’s funny, it’s cute, it has a lot of depth to offer, and above all, it appears to be fun.

My total time has been short, so expect some additional coverage down the line. You can keep an eye on the game’s progress via this message board thread, or hey, give it a try yourself next week if the Apple approval process goes well.

[source]

The description for Ziggurat [$.99] calls it “the end of a much longer story — a story which ends with The Last Human On Earth standing atop a stratosphere-high stone pyramid.” Incoboto [$3.99] could have been described similarly: “Incoboto is the end of a much longer story — a story which ends with The Last Human in the Galaxy trying to survive the heat death of the universe.”

It’s a uniquely lonely and melancholy game, and almost every visual and design tweak reinforces that. Inco, the protagonist and player-character, is tiny and feels insignificant next to the immense contraptions he has to manipulate to find new energy sources for his dying solar system; if you zoom the map out far enough, he disappears from sight completely.

Incoboto’s elegant one-finger touch controls keep developer Fluttermind from having to implement a cluttered user interface, keeping players’ focus on only a few things at a time. The relative abundance of inky black sky only reinforces the idea that Inco is thoroughly alone. In fact, the only communication he receives are from outdated corporate memos and the fragmented death rattles of the dead and dying inhabitants of the Milky Way.

Well … that’s not entirely true.

There’s a sentient star named Helios who chirps and bubbles his way through the galaxy  at Inco’s side, helping him solve puzzles and cannibalizing enough “starpieces” to reinvigorate the cosmos. Helios is consummately chipper, and puts Inco’s dire situation in sharp relief. The best science fiction makes the audience forget that the world is ending in favor of highlighting interpersonal relationships. It only takes a few minutes for Helios to become a charming and precious  sidekick, and Fluttermind achieve it with a few words of broken dialogue and a handful of facial animations. It also doesn’t hurt that cooperation with Helios is crucial to solving most of Incoboto’s puzzles. Utility breeds empathy.

Nevertheless, Fluttermind bring a sort of streamlined efficiency to the rest of their game as well. There’s not a stray piece of dialogue to be found, or a single puzzle or mechanic that doesn’t build upon, integrate, or recontextualize something that came before it.

Incoboto’s galaxy is comprised of a number of small clusters loaded up with machinery, contraptions, portals, force fields, and various other doo-dads designed to encumber Inco on his quest for starpieces. Each world or cluster introduces a new puzzle concept or piece of gear, usually accompanied by Tweet-able slogans or warnings from the cartoonishly evil, Cave-Johnson-era-Aperture-Science-esque Corporation. The worlds feel full and realized: as the Corporation spread, it makes sense that they’d leave defunct machinery in their wake, abandoned on planets slowly rotating about their axes.

The comparison to Portal doesn’t come lightly. A large portion of the puzzles Inco must solve are portal based, and the basics of momentum will be crucial to understanding the toughest ones. More generally, Incoboto falls well within the broad spectrum of physics puzzle games.

Each gameplay chunk is relatively short and discrete — gates to new worlds are unlocked as Helios eats more starpieces — and each new section introduces a new mechanic, giving Incoboto a feeling of constant forward progress. The real trick is how seamlessly each of Incoboto’s new lessons makes its way into the next series of puzzles, getting absorbed into an ever-expanding framework of mechanics and concepts. There are clear laws in Incoboto, but Fluttermind is at liberty to interpret them differently from world to world.

Each gameplay element — the puzzles, the bombs, the gravity beams — are relatively simple, but Fluttermind integrate them in such a way that the game never feels straightforward or boring. Incoboto’s complexity is matched by smart, efficient pacing. I often felt like I was mastering a complex system in a short amount of time. It also makes each section feel meaningful and genuine, giving Incoboto the feel of a much larger and fully-featured game.

In other words, when Incoboto is firing on all cylinders, it’s an empowering puzzle game that makes its players feel smart and successful, like the last gear in a Swiss watch.

When Incoboto stretches too far — when the puzzles seem impossible or, more often, when the touch controls don’t live up to the platforming required of them — it comes crashing to a halt. I spent three days firmly, mind-numbingly stuck in the KindWord system last week.

Finally figuring KindWord out was its own reward, but a single huge breakthrough isn’t quite the same feeling as the joy of sustained momentum, of watching Incoboto’s system gyrate in perfect harmony.  Incoboto is elegant and subdued, unafraid to juxtapose the vastness of the cosmos and the terror of inevitable burning out with the intimacy and charm of a small boy befriending a star. It’s tightly and efficiently designed and as much an experience as it is a game, one that I do hope you check out.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

If you’re anything like me, the idea of a remake of a game you dearly loved when it was originally released comes as very good news. As much as I adore new games, there’s just something about playing something tried and true. Add HD graphics into that mix, and you’re really tempting me… which really should have been the case with Prince of Persia Classic [$1.99/HD]. I was hoping to be having so much fun with this game that it’d be hard to put the phone down to write this review, but unfortunately, that was not quite the case.

Prince of Persia Classic is far from all bad. If you played the game in its original form as a downloadable console title a few years back (or heaven forbid, even further back on the Apple II), you’ll recall that it had its charming parts… and its annoying ones. Still, there’s no denying that some of us spent countless hours navigating the prince through death traps, spiked pits, and all those things that make a game a proper adventure.

For one thing, the game looks and sounds absolutely gorgeous. Ubisoft has carefully gone through and retooled this for the modern gamer, doing their best to retain the spirit of the original and do it proper justice. I’d say that part works, but once you start playing it, that’s where the trouble seems to come in.

As you or may not know, Prince of Persia Classic is a sidescroller which requires lots of running and jumping to keep the prince safe as you navigate your way forward. This would have been great fun if the controls that allow you to do so weren’t awkward, but unfortunately they are. They feel a bit stiff and take some getting used to as a whole, which is not ideal when it comes to a game you want to pick up and play. Your movement control is a left to right slide bar, which really could have benefitted from a bit more sensitivity. It’s easy to make the prince run when you mean for him to walk, and you’ll have to learn to keep tight control of him to not hurl him down a chasm by accident.

If you can get comfy with the controls though, there’s a lot more in store for you beyond that. You have Normal, Time Attack and Survival modes to try out (the latter which challenges you to navigate the castle and save the princess in one hour or less), and of course the usual Facebook connectivity. You’ve also got Game Center included so scoreboards and achievements ought to keep you going for a while.

As it was in its original incarnation, Prince of Persia Classic is also a game that you’ll need to play a lot and die in a lot before you get a handle on how to really progress. Checkpoints help to make this reasonable, but I recognized some of that same frustration I felt playing the first one, as well as other retro titles from the same era. You had to be really tenacious to beat some of these titles back in the day. I think old schoolers would keep trying, but some other gamers with less experience might give up. Of course, it’s hard to say if that’s the fault of the difficulty curve of older games, or how much easier newer ones have become.

The verdict? If you must have it portable, it’s not the worst choice But if you just love the game, there are fine versions of it on XBLA and PSN that are simply easier to maneuver. They’re a few bucks more, but it might be worth it to you if awkward controls are your idea of a platforming nightmare.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

Lately it feels like racing titles on iOS place a greater emphasis on realism (whether in visuals or controls) and less on simple, enjoyable gameplay. Retro Racing [$0.99] looks to rectify that with an emphasis on fun, fast gameplay that sacrifices depth for arcade basics. While Retro Racing suffers from being way too short, the experience it does offer does a good job taking you back to the days of classic top-down arcade racers.

As its name implies, Retro Racing harkens back to the old days of top-down pixelated racers. Each track is chock-full of turns, obstacles, and (most importantly) power-ups. Power-ups range from tires (which improve turning), to acceleration and top speed upgrades, to the standard nitro boost. While the goal of each track is to finish in third place or better in order to advance, you’ll find that later tracks essentially require you to focus on power-up collection (while navigating the tracks flawlessly) in order to have a chance at advancement. It plays like a simpler version of old-school console racers such as R.C. Pro-Am.

In this regard, I’m a fan of the gameplay in Retro Racing. There aren’t any deep elements such as a cash or parts system, but it does a good job recreating the classic racer experience, particularly with the limited randomness of the power-up system. The gameplay is fast and the controls are responsive, although they’re not exactly the easiest to maneuver with its limited schemes. Retro Racing is a portrait-only game which makes playing on an iPhone feel incredibly cramped, though it feels just fine on an iPad. It’s baffling that there isn’t support for playing in landscape mode, but hopefully that option can come in an update someday.

Another nice touch that Retro Racing offers is split screen same device multiplayer on the iPad. While I found the experience decent enough for the local play it offers, it’s (obviously) of limited use for gamers that primarily play with others via the internet. Still, it’s better than not including it at all.

Retro Racing comes with full leaderboard support. However, you’ll quickly find that in order to compete on the leaderboards, you’ll have to purchase the extra vehicles with increased stats (the game has three default cars with various attributes plus three souped up cars as a purchase). While the developer has stated that the game will eventually let you unlock them without IAP, the simple fact is if leaderboard chasing is your hobby, you need to shell out more cash.

Another complaint with Retro Racing lies in its longevity. To put it bluntly, Retro Racing is incredibly short. There’re only twelve total tracks, and each can be learned and completed in a short amount of time. Granted, there is some replayability even after completing all the tracks simply based on the aforementioned leaderboard competition. However, I don’t think it’s enough to sustain the game for very long. I really would have liked to have seen more tracks at launch, although features like online multiplayer or a track editor would have really vaulted the game into the spotlight.

At this point, Retro Racing is one of those games with a decent gameplay formula that could have been so much more. The developer has been pretty active in our forums and has stated that more tracks and possibly other wish list features will make it into subsequent updates. Meanwhile, Retro Racing is still worth checking out for fans of classic top-down racers, as long as you don’t mind a lack of substance and a tiny assortment of tracks.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]