Wave Blazer

Phone gaming has done car racing to death now. And motorbike racing. So what’s left? Jet boats, that’s what. Tiny craft with huge power to weight ratios that hurtle around twisty courses – and it’s
all on your iPhone. Wave Blazer isn’t a perfect game by any means, but it flows well (geddit?), is nicely pitched in terms of difficulty and (most of the time) looks gorgeous too.

The game structure will be familiar: a number of jet boats with different characteristics that you unlock, one at a time, by doing well. You also gradually unlock more and more courses, which start easy and very quickly get treacherously complicated. Boat control is via the iPhone’s accelerometer, as you’d expect, and the physics of steering and racing is modelled pretty well – there’s a real thrill about skidding the boat around a tight turn with water churning away beside you. In Grand Prix mode (the main game), you race against other drivers, but there are also two time-based modes (Time Trial and Arcade) if you’re afraid of the competition.

The 3D visuals are good, with some nice water reflections, even though it’s soon obvious that everything’s faked to some degree – we’re not
talking about photo-realism here. Still, by sticking to reasonably simple (but effective) graphics, the developers have managed to create a game that moves as fast as it needs to, in order to recreate a very fast sport.

Adding interest while you race are a techno soundtrack and some basic water and engine sound effects, a number of items that you have to
collect by driving through (giving you extra speed, for example) and two on-screen controls: the oddly named ‘Respawn’ puts you back in the
centre of the course, should you get stuck in some reeds or underneath a jetty, for example. And ‘Autopilot’ is supposed to take over from
you for up to 15 seconds per lap, to help you steer on the really tricky bits – but I couldn’t get this working (strangely) – my boat still crashed into the sides of the course.

Online Multiplayer play looks promising, with multiple game rooms and associated lobbies for picking up opponents, but these were always
empty during the review period – I guess Wave Blazer hasn’t reached critical mass yet in the iPhone gaming world. Whereas other games
(e.g. Adrenaline Pool Online) are mainly played multi-player, and so most players are online all the time and ready to play, Wave Blazer has enough local gameplay that players will venture online into multiplayer far less frequently. With the result that there are few people around to play, and so on. A vicious circle that can only be broken by a burst of popularity.

But with a few interface tweaks and greater popularity, Wave Blazer could become an iPhone gaming classic.