Swing Racers - Woozy graphics spoil the fun
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iOS
| Swing Racers

Swing Racers makes me feel a bit sick. All of the backgrounds distort in this weird way as the camera swings about and it makes me want to get some fresh air.

This is on an iPad Air, and the iPhone 6 Plus, and it sort of looks like the game has been stretched in funny ways to make it fit on the screen. Which is a shame, because the action underneath the woozy graphics is actually a lot of fun.

Sick racing

The game takes its cues from Micro Machines. You're a diddy little racer driving through the various rooms of a house.

There's the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, the garden, and the pool room. Because everyone has a pool room with multiple pool tables in their house, right?

Rather than using buttons to steer and accelerate, you use a finger. Push it onto the screen and it's connected to your vehicle by a digital elastic band.

The further you drag your finger from your car, the faster it goes. The simple system works remarkably well, and while it's not exactly original, bezzing around the tracks is an awful lot of fun.

There are the usual zany-racer power-ups scattered around the track. These are triggered automatically when you drive over them, so there's no extra controls to worry about.

You're jumping over piles of cards, skirting the edges of dirty sinks, tumbling into bins, and flying underneath loops of hose. And it's all pretty darn enjoyable. Until the sickness kicks in and you want to barf everywhere.

Blow chunks

There are different styles of levels, and while the straight-up racing just about manages to counter-act the motion sickness, there are challenge levels where the wildly swinging camera makes it all rather unpleasant.

And it's a real shame, because Swing Racers could have been an awful lot of fun. As it stands, you might want to check if it makes you want to hurl before you give it a go.

Swing Racers - Woozy graphics spoil the fun

I stopped playing Swing Racers about 20 minutes ago and I still feel a bit sick
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.