Playing a driving game about Hummers is a bit like playing a WWII game from the perspective of the Nazis. Not since the Panzer has a vehicle more totally encapsulated a liberal, clear-thinking person's idea of pure evil, and having spent one's life dutifully rinsing out pesto jars and watching An Inconvenient Truth it's slightly odd to be strapping in to Mother's Nature's scourge.
Hummer Jump and Race has a slightly misleading title. Given that it's about driving ostentatious road cars, and that the word 'jump' appears before the word 'race', you'd be forgiven for assuming that it's a rather flippant game. And you'd be right, insofar as it is occasionally possible to jump very high.
However, if you accept the game's implicit invitation to throw your vehicle around and launch it through the air like a madman you'll end up losing every race. Hummer Jump and Run is actually quite a serious racer, and in some respects one of the most accomplished of its kind on mobile.
Putting the 3D graphics aside for a moment, its most impressive feature is its innovative approach to control. Most mobile racers fall back on auto-accelerate, requiring to press '2' just once to put pedal to metal, and braking with '8'. It's a decent solution to the problems posed by the mobile's limited interface, but Hummer raises the bar.
Rather than just the binary states of 'accelerate' or 'don't accelerate', there are five different speeds you can race at, all indicated by what looks like an automatic gear-stick with five notches for forward movement and two for reverse. You climb them by pressing '2', and descend with '8'.
This enables you to take whole stretches at a reduced speed, rather than struggling to temper your car's inexorable forward momentum by feathering the '8' key, and it works outstandingly well.
Taking a jump at the wrong speed or angle will see your car topple, which can be annoying .The fact that you can roll your car at all, however, speaks volumes for the game's excellent vehicle physics.
There are six circuits, but very little visual variety since they're really three variations on two tracks. Death Valley is a dusty sprawl, reiterated twice as D.V. Dust and D.V. Ridge, while Lonely Peak winds through a dense forest three times, as itself and as L.P Summit and L.P. Rain.
For all that they look alike, however, the tracks are beautifully textured and contoured in gritty-looking polygons. Details like houses, water towers, and tractors litter the roadsides, while the distant wallpaper backdrops are unobtrusive and solid. In L.P. Rain, the angle at which the rain falls even changes according to how fast you're going. Hummer doesn't have great range, but it does what it does well.
And what it does best of all is the actual racing. After struggling for a couple of minutes with slightly unresponsive controls (adjusting your speed constantly as well as steering lays bare the mobile's inability to process two button-presses at once) you'll be guiding your Hummer around the tracks with a degree of precision you never thought you'd achieve on mobile, slowing for tight corners and barrelling along straights.
The more playful elements of the game are the least successful. The jumps that you come across every few hundred yards toss you into the air like a tornado, and are about as disruptive. There's also a boost, which you can activate with '1' or '3' depending on your handedness, but we didn't find ourselves making much use of it, and given the excellent acceleration system we never got as far as using the brakes.
There's a Quick Race mode, with everything unlocked from the get-go, and a Championship option in which you can unlock two new Hummers in addition to the one you start with. It's also possible to customise the colour of your vehicle, but in general Hummer is fairly short on options, just as it is on tracks.
As such, the areas in which it shines are offset a little by those in which the sheen is dull. The same game with a greater variety of tracks, more unlockable features, and no tedious jumps would have been close to perfection. As it is, Hummer more or less keeps pace with the front-runners, and if you're a fan of arcade racers you really shouldn't let it pass you by.
Hummer Jump and Race
With innovative controls and credible vehicle physics, Hummer Jump and Race is an excellent driving game at its core, only let down by a lack of tracks and the intrusive jumps of the title. Well worth a look
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though, following a departure in late December 2015.