Cro-Mag Rally

Cro-Mag Rally Posted in Racing on 10 Jul 2008

Reviewed by Steve Litchfield

User’s rating: (8 votes, average: 3.25 out of 5)  Loading ...

Editor’s rating:

Cro-Mag Rally has been in the top 25 commercial applications in the iPhone App Store constantly since its release in the first few weeks of the platform. It’s an out and out success story and superbly polished, think Nintendo Mario Kart but (largely) set in the stone age, but it’s by no means perfect, at least not in terms of its appeal to a wide gaming audience. For the casual gamer, it’s too easy to lose your way and its physics are too different from those in the real world.

From the opening screens, crawling with realistic prehistoric beetles and swept by flying dinosaurs, to the animated settings screens, from the superbly fast frame rates to the texture-mapped 3D graphics, Cro-Mag Rally oozes quality at every seam. There are nine different virtual worlds to race round (including one totally underwater!), as a male or female racer, in 11 different wierd and wonderful vehicles, and with 9 different powerups, ranging from ink bombs (to leave for your opponents) to lightning ’speed boosts’ to maces to fireworks.

With very similar feel to Mario Kart on other platforms, there’s little pretense here at a realistic driving experience, you simply veer around the rough and ready courses, trying to keep the vehicle pointing in roughly the right direction and not to bash into anything nasty. You can career full tilt into an obstacle, with no other effect than to stop your progress until you reverse and try to go around again. You can even dive off into an adjacent lake, with the only effect being that you have to chug along slowly through the water until you reach a ramp to get your vehicle back on dry ground again.

As with Mario Kart, the interactions with your opponents are the best thing about the game. You can attack them with weapons or, simply, ram them, complete with nice collision animations and sound effects, and even tyre skid marks on the road to prove what happened.

One problem with Cro-Mag Rally, and the reason it didn’t get the full 5 stars, is that, unlike a traditional game where the road is well defined, here the nine ancient worlds are so superbly imagined and drawn and they have so many ramps, gulleys and objects to explore, it’s just far too easy to find yourself ‘off-road’ and slammed up against a wall or obstacle, especially after a vicious right angle turn, with no visual clues as to what you did wrong and which way you should go next. So you end up heading off and relying on seeing (or not seeing) a flashing red cross in order to work out whether you got it right or wrong. Hardened gamers will say ‘Ah, this is so that you have to play the courses again and again in order to learn exactly where the track goes’, but as a casual gamer I found the tracks confusing.

In addition, acceleration is through keeping your finger down on a ‘F’/'R’ stick, but in the heat of racing it’s very easy to either let your finger slip and thus slow down or get thrust into reverse just when you need the speed, or to forget that your finger is pressed down and end up going so fast that you career out of control. With no granularity between maximum forward and back acceleration, there’s simply no subtlety here – an option for automatic accelerator control would have been much better here.

In addition, the iPhone accelerometer (tilt) steering is, by default, very sensitive, though full marks to Pangea for putting in a selection of sliders to customise the vehicle’s responsiveness. The detail, care and attention throughout the game is staggering and the title wouldn’t be out of place at five times the price on the Nintendo DS or similar. But I’m still going to stick to my star rating if you don’t mind.