Game Reviews

Ghost Racer

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iOS
| Ghost Racer
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Ghost Racer
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iOS
| Ghost Racer

One of my favourite things to do in racing games is to use my opponents as brakes. You plough into a corner, aim for whoever's in the lead, and use the chassis of his car to slow you down. Usually you end up facing in the right direction and they end up in a gravel trap.

You can't do that in Ghost Racer because, as the title suggests, you're racing against ghosts. Using non-corporeal representations of your and other players' best lap times as brakes is just not possible, and that, and a few other niggles, conspire to squash the fun out of the game.

Ford Mondeooooooo

The aim is always to beat lap times. You start off with three tracks, each with a gold, silver, and bronze time to try and better. Beat one of the times and you get a trophy. Getting trophies on all three tracks opens up the next three, with 12 in total to unlock.

The action takes place from a top-down perspective, and you control your car with simple touchscreen commands. One for accelerate and one for brake on the right, and one for left and one for right on the right.

It's a little tricky to get the hang of driving at first. The controls are less arcadey than you'd imagine, and the game is swift to punish you in you drive even a pixel's-width off the track. You're going to need to learn to read the track to get the best times.

The ghosts, which are the hook of the game, can be turned on and off at will. You'll always be driving against your own fastest lap, but you can choose to compete against others from the leaderboards as well.

Vauxhall Corpse-a

While competing against others might sound like a blast, in practice it strips a lot of the fun from the game. If you mess up the first corner, you know you've no chance of catching up, so you'll reach for the 'restart' button and try again.

Add in the fact that, on an iPad at least, the buttons you use to control your car are a little bit too small and you're left with a game that's weighed down by a few too many flaws.

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Ghost Racer

There's some fun to be had here, but too often Ghost Racer is a source of frustration rather than enjoyment
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.