Game Reviews

Electro Racer

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Electro Racer
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| Electro Racer

With the shift to renewable energy already a tough sell, Electro Racer only makes the case for clean cars harder.

It's without class, without speed, and most crucially without much of a game in the first place. An alarming lack of content makes playing feel more like a test drive than full gaming experience.

Green behind the ears

It's worth pointing out that it's something of a budget release and a lack of content certainly reflects the cheap price.

Coming in with just two remarkably similar tracks and four craft, there really isn't much here to grab your attention for too long, both courses acting as separate entities rather than being linked to form any sort of Career mode.

As a result, Electro Racer plays more like a tech demo, and not a particularly good one at that. The tilt controls feel entirely too floaty. Poor track designs laden with sharp 90-degree turns only play to this weakness in the controls.

The accelerometer handles steering at the basic level, whereas tapping either side of the screen yields a tighter turning angle. It's an added element that seems like a last minute compromise, the developer attempting to add a sense of precision to an otherwise loose set-up.

Cheap fuel

Aware of its own halting racing, a boost system tries injecting a bit of energy, but it comes with a flawed twist.

The idea plays upon the notion that each of the four craft is powered by clean energy such as an electric battery, hydrogen cell, etc. As such, charging them means picking up corresponding icons on the track.

Given that said icons are usually lined up in a row across the track, it's a system that favours whichever icon happens to be placed along the racing line. Picking up the correct boost is a case of darting all over the track, following an extraordinarily unnatural path and basically racing like a lunatic.

Rather than being an intuitive way of encouraging risk taking and dragging you out of your comfort zone, such an awkward set-up is simply an example of lazy design. This alone could be the game's epitaph.

No competition

The whole thing feels dour and uninspired. The two races are dressed in exactly the same clothes (making it difficult to recollect just which one you're on in the first place), and even the grating noise that's triggered whenever you make contact with the side of the track - often completely out of time with the actual contact itself - cheapens the experience.

All such faults could be tolerated if the races themselves were exciting. Instead, your three competitors come with little personality or skill. They're easily defeated and leave the game without any sense of challenge.

Entirely generic, lacking any unique fixtures and fittings beyond a rather crooked boost system, Electro Racer is the very definition of an also-ran, and one that feels just as cheap to play as it is to buy.

Electro Racer

Dull, vacuous, and especially short to boot, Electro Racer provides the answer to who killed the electric car
Score
Keith Andrew
Keith Andrew
With a fine eye for detail, Keith Andrew is fuelled by strong coffee, Kylie Minogue and the shapely curve of a san serif font. He's also Pocket Gamer's resident football gaming expert and, thanks to his work on PG.biz, monitors the market share of all mobile OSes on a daily basis.