XBLA Indie Review: Easy Racing
“Not Quite Worth Your Time.”
An XboxHornet Review By WDesm.
Andreil’s Game has released another offering onto XBLIG to go alongside their prior fantastic-but-flawed offerings of Pioneer and Dark Seal. The technical skills of the team continue to improve, but it appears that the creativity of the team might have stalled out. Easy Racing is a very simplistic take on overhead racing, with the illusion of free-form roaming being a deterrent rather than a feature. While the game improves on prior Andreil’s releases by being nearly bug-free, the game has limited features, no creative additions to the racing genre, and zero reasons to play more than a single lap of gameplay.
Easy Racing starts most races in the worst way possible: the enigmatic ship design doesn’t clearly show you which way you are facing, which means that you can literally start a race by zooming off into a bad turn. What’s worse is that accidentally backpedaling too far can have the lap counter go into the negatives, and some users have reported problems with the game recognizing the current lap as “-1/X”: you may just have to run an additional lap over everyone else to finish the race. After figuring out which way you are pointed, the race plays out very crudely; collisions with any object will instantly halt you, but there is no damage to either ship – it was relatively easy to create horrible traffic jams at choke points in the map, which, while frustrating, did nothing advantageous (after all, you were stuck in the mess as well!).
The game promotes “free travel”, but the promotion is a hollow one, as there is a perpetual arrowed path to follow. If the racetrack were a different style, say, simply an arrow pointing in a general direction, and fewer “hard” obstacles (in favour of soft obstacles such as mud, destructible walls, etc, which are completely lacking in the game), then there would be an advantage to free-running your own path. As it is, there is little incentive to get creative, unless you play the (limited) collection of maps diligently enough to foresee minor shortcut advantages.
The cars seem nearly identical, but even if they were vastly different, the complete lack of information the game gives you (either visually in the form of bars, meters, or icons, or literally in a text or description page) makes determining differences nigh-impossible. I’m not at all sure how I was supposed to figure out the different advantages between 60 cars, but I certainly couldn’t determine how to after multiple gameplay sessions, and there was little reward or challenge to unlocking new enigmatic vehicles.
With only local play (the “Challenge” mode is single player, but the “Chaotic Rally” is up to four players), no high score whatsoever, no timer for laps (a long-standing incentive to go fast in racing games), no manual map selection, and minimal useful options, Easy Racing is a game to avoid. I’m not sure why it is priced at the maximum cost, when you get such minimal value.
Game Score 3/10.
Download a free demo of the game here.
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[...] Andreil Game is a familiar face around XBLIG; with a stocked library such as Pioneer, Dark Seal, Easy Racing, Dungeon Tales, Pioneerz, Orcs!, Little Strategy, and a few others that I’m sure I missed, [...]