Previews

Hands on with Fast & Furious on mobile

Looks like it'll make us quite happy, actually

Hands on with Fast & Furious on mobile
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| Fast and Furious

We don’t labour the point, as we like to do a little something to save game publisher’s feelings, but sometimes it’s got to be said: good movies make bad games.

But, sometimes, the inverse seems to be true: bad movies can make good games. Just look at The Fast and the Furious franchise.

In the films, the cars arguably have better dialogue than the actors, but once the Hollyood guff has been stripped away - as it is in the five mobile games I-play has put out over the years - we’ve been left with some pretty superb racing games that make an effort to do something other than chasing cars to the finish line.

Now the franchise (both movie and game) is set for a re-launch in Fast & Furious - a title that’s guaranteed to confuse the kind of person who enjoyed the original film. But the strength of the mobile game franchise is enough to get us reasonably excited about a new addition, which I-play has just sent over direct from the Firemint studios.

Dropping the name Firemint into any racing game preview immediately bodes well for a game, of course, and Fast & Furious is looking to be another success of programming panache from the celebrated developer.

As this particular racing game series has always demanded, the gameplay is suitably varied - often coming close to the shooter, or even platform genres. Needless to say there are flat out races to win, and most involve you putting up the pink slip to one of your cars in order to accept the challenge. Lose, and you lose your motor, which is an excellent motivational method.

We’re also seeing some of the action plotlines filtering through from the cinema. The high speed pursuits are accompanied by completely unexpected levels, such as trying to run a three trailer petrol lorry off the road (not easy in a pickup truck) or the popular drift challenges, requiring you to slide your way around corners to victory.

All this gameplay variety is backed up by some impressive 3D visuals. No detail appears to have been too small when it comes to the cars, tracks or environments. In Fast & Furious, most of the races seem to be linear, rather than the usual ‘three laps’ style of petrol burning, giving us some good looking (and lengthy) tracks to tear up.

They wind through cityscapes, underpasses, country and highways in equal measure, so of any faults Fast & Furious might have, tedium certainly isn’t going to be one of them.

These roads are rather sparse when it comes to traffic, but when compared to the massive road trains you’ve to hunt down (something we’ve never seen before in a mobile racer), the diversity of the tracks or the intelligent, yet fallible, CPU controlled opponents you’re up against, it’s forgivable that you don’t have too many NPC cars to avoid.

There are also a lot of enticing cinematic cut-scenes that help to tell the story along the way. Not that they’re trying to recreate the movie as a game, but each race or encounter has its own objective, and these action sequences add a lot of mortar to the joins between races.

It’s rather a quiet affair, however. At the moment, all we’re hearing is a single, short ditty plinking away on an infinite loop, which really doesn’t set the tone of the aggressive racing at all.

Scrapping the music and adding in some roaring engine and screeching tyre effects would be far more conducive to the high-octane atmosphere the rest of the game instantly conjures up.

But despite this small shortcoming, it seems Firemint has gone all out to bring mobile racing back up to speed, and help it compete with the new range of gaming smartphones dominating the industry.

The game is shaping up very well. We'll let you draw your own conclusions as to what that means for the film...

Spanner Spencer
Spanner Spencer
Yes. Spanner's his real name, and he's already heard that joke you just thought of. Although Spanner's not very good, he's quite fast, and that seems to be enough to keep him in a regular supply of free games and away from the depressing world of real work.