Game Reviews

Speedx 3D

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Speedx 3D
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| SpeedX 3D

I once embarked on a 1,000 kilometre road trip along the mountainous, poorly lit southern tip of South Africa. Upon my return to the UK I discovered that my eyesight had deteriorated to a point where I was unfit to drive without glasses.

Oops.

Thinking back to that journey, it was quite surreal - weaving through the twisting mountain passes at night, with poor visibility (in every sense) leading to blurry shapes popping out of the dark at me. Road signs, dogs, people – it was hard to tell at speed.

It was an experience that was brought back to me recently while playing Speedx 3D.

Tunnel vision

That’s not to say that Speedx 3D is a blurry, indistinct mess. Far from it. But it does evoke that familiar sense of intense concentration - eyes firmly fixed on the horizon - that anyone familiar with night-driving on a challenging road will understand.

Of course Speedx’s roads bear little resemblance to the flat, pot-holed strips of tarmac you might be familiar with. These are abstract tunnels made up of solid white (and occasionally black) squares.

Soon you'll witness coloured lines appearing as you automatically pick up pace, which is your signal to shift to the left or right of them using the game’s accelerometer controls. Fail to do this in time and you’ll plough into the solid block that lies at the end of the coloured strips, stopping your distance-based score from ticking further upwards.

And that’s about it for Speedx. It’s a remarkably focused experience, simply requiring you to avoid crashing. There’s the addition of orange collectibles which almost act as extra lives, but the core principle is simple and unchanging.

Tubular bells and whistles

The variety comes in the nature of the tunnels themselves, which are generated randomly. Starting out as simple tubular constructs, they soon open out into wide roadways and even to the point where you’re riding on the kind of tunnels you were previously corkscrewing through.

The key to all this is that it runs at a terrific rate, even on our old G1. The slick (though admittedly simple) 3D graphics rarely if ever caused our handset to miss a beat, which – in our experience – is something of a rarity.

The main issue we have with Speedx 3D - alongside the sparseness of the overall package - is that it's a tad unforgiving, demanding razor-sharp reactions almost from the off. This isn’t helped by the slightly woolly accelerometer controls which, though they can be adjusted, never quite shake the impression that physical or virtual controls would be superior (for precision if not immersion).

Still, Speedx should be applauded for what it represents – a slick, stylish and addictive Android exclusive. We’ll certainly be keeping our eyes glued to the horizon for more from HyperBees.

Speedx 3D

Speedx 3D is a slick tunnel racer that nails the timeless high-score mentality of classic arcade games
Score
Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.