With Reckless Racing, the Super Off-Road genre is updated for the iPhone age. Have you ever been at an old arcade, feeding quarter after quarter into Super Off-Road, while silently wishing they’d bought the Smokey and the Bandit licence instead? Neither did I drift hunters, but the Pixelbite team must have known this. What other explanation is there for their fantastic new top-down racer with a dash of southern hospitality?
A dash of southern hospitality
Reckless Racing, like the aforementioned Super Off-Road, is a top-down racing game focused on swerving and sliding over muddy turns. To win the respect of their fellow hillbillies, players will slam on the brakes and floor the throttle.
I never imagined I’d use the term “hillbilly competition” in my lifetime, but the game is rife with tired old southern stereotypes. Cletus, Otis, and Lurlene are some of the names used for the characters. The scenery on tracks like Bubba’s Yard seems like it taken straight out of The Dukes of Hazzard. The music doesn’t shy away from using a banjo or two. Without a doubt, Reckless Racing restores the dirt to dirt racing.
Stereotypical portrayal of southerners
The gameplay is fantastic, despite the fairly stereotypical portrayal of southerners. Despite the vehicles’ frequent slip-ups on the muddy tracks, their handling is superb. Players may pick from a number of different control schemes, including on-screen arrows, virtual steering wheels, and tilt controls. With the exception of tilt, which didn’t let us to make as sharp of turns as we’d hoped, we felt that every mode offered something interesting and fun to try. (Despite this, we used the built-in on-screen arrows for the rest of our playthrough.)
The courses also nicely conceived, with challenging twists drift hunters and turns, beautiful environments, and varied road surfaces; nevertheless, this does not imply that they could not be enhanced. There are certain places that appear like they would be great places to cut corners, like a cliff that overlooks the next section of track just before you come up to a bend, but instead they have the same effects as driving into a lake. Your vehicle will temporarily vanish before reappearing on the course.
Reckless Racing
We appreciated the unique track layouts, but more of them would have been welcome. It takes around 15 minutes to see all there is to see in Reckless Racing, yet there are only five courses (ten if you consider racing them in reverse).
Reckless Racing is a sizable collection despite the limited amount of courses. Players may choose from a variety of game types in addition to the regular races. For instance, Hot Lap is the game’s regular time trial option, and since the circuits are so short, it’s perhaps the most exciting (and difficult) of the bunch. The delivery mode, on the other hand, is like a more difficult version of Crazy Taxi. Players are responsible with transporting goods from one area to another. The longer it takes, the less money you’ll make per unit of time. These modes are great fun, but the best by far is the online multiplayer.
The online play here provides
A decent racing game is one in which the player competes against other people. Since the computer opponents in Reckless Racing’s single-player races are so weak, you won’t really grasp just how difficult the game’s courses are until you jump into the online arena. The online play here provides the kind of insane, edge-of-your-seat excitement we’d been expecting for all along, with players swapping paint left and right and pushing opponents into the muck or down to the bottom of the lake.
The technological side of things isn’t quite there yet, but it’s miles ahead of the competition. If there’s a little delay, one of your rivals’ cars may sputter and jerk about the track, but other than that, you have nothing to complain about. While it would have been nice to have AI take over for a player who leaves early, particularly when the host quits and ends the race, our online experience was quite rock solid, with no disconnections and a smooth ride on the player’s end.
Reckless Racing
Reckless Racing looks and plays well on both the iPad and iPhone, but the iPad is clearly where it belongs. Everything seems more genuine on the larger screen, from the little cars to the intricate scenery. Besides looking better, the iPad also has a few mysterious benefits over the iPhone version, such as allowing you to choose your car’s colour and adding three more circuits (six with reverse), which are undoubtedly the greatest in the game.
Reckless Racing is a must-buy on whichever platform it’s available on if you’re the sort of player who misses the good old days of arcade classics like Super Sprint and Super Off-Road. Fun in the dirt can be had right away in Reckless Racing thanks to the game’s stunning visuals, excellent presentation, and fast online multiplayer.
