It’s often said that drivers today have become overly reliant on satellite navigation technology, and not enough on their own directional instincts.
This is backed up by anecdotal evidence of people driving into the sea or 300 miles out of the way on their little talking box’s say-so.
Unusually, Fishlabs's development sat nav seems to have been out of kilter for Burning Tires. It’s hard to know where it was going with it.
At a crossroadBurning Tires lacks direction as a racing game. Part cutesy kart racer, part straight-faced racer, it fails on both counts.
As a kart racer, it fails to engage with a lack of power-ups, track furniture and exciting track design (it’s a bland collection of fire, ice, and desert levels). It also lacks the bouncy, easy-going handling physics of your average Mario Kart clone. Contact with other racers bounces you around too much, as does contact with track-side objects.
As a more serious racer, the tone is too light and the racing model too insubstantial to sate the desires of your average racing nut. The handling is extremely simplistic – all you have to do is concentrate on steering, with no accelerator, brake or even boost controls.
Those steering controls aren’t particularly good, either. There’s a choice between accelerometer and touch controls, but neither allows you to make an instinctive connection with the loose slidey handling.
Long way roundIt’s not all bad news, though. This being a Fishlabs game, the 3D graphics are solid and well drawn, and they moved at an adequate framerate on our Motorola Milestone.
Indeed, the menu screens seemed to strain our handset far more than the races themselves, with laborious button-responses and loading screens. We experienced a few force-close screens, too, but some of these were ignorable.
Hopefully such technical issues will be addressed with an update or two.
Unfortunately, no amount of updates will be able to make up for Burning Tires’s lack of direction. It heads for a location in between light hearted kart racing and serious track racing, but gets lost along the way.