The problem with games as an art form, is it takes more that just a great idea to make a great game. A film can simply be a sequence of shots illustrating a point, a book can be just a series of prose (ever tried reading James Joyce’s Ulysses?), but a game has to have an entire world created around something as simple as an idea.
This is the problem Real World Racing faces. I absolutely love the idea of taking satellite images and turning them into maps, making them interactive in an almost Augmented Reality fashion. And the concept is well implemented. The 3D objects such as trees and buildings really do stand out to make a vivid environment. Unfortunately, you’ll hardly notice you’re racing on a photograph at all. The reason for this is the screen gets incredibly busy while you race: Up to 15 other cars, HUDS, real world hustle & bustle, street signs, directional prompts, driving assists. You can turn some of the latter off, but then distinguishing what’s track and what’s not becomes very difficult indeed.
The driving itself feels a tad clunky and heavy handed. Not so much that you can’t play the game, but it does hamper the drifting mechanics, making the game unnecessarily difficult to play at times. The cars are all so similar and lack detail that it’s impossible to distinguish between them at times. Couple this with sluggish driving and a turn up ahead, and you can see why the game feels unfairly hard at times. With the drift & slipstream features, and the dynamics of the courses, often specs of individual cars feel quite moot, resulting in acceleration playing the most dominant role.
The career mode has you racing across the world in actual locations, around famous cities and landmarks. By passing a course in the Career Mode, you unlock it for future use in Arcade Mode. However, racing these tracks multiple times can very quickly become monotonous. One of the problems with racing on real roads, is some of the maps can be a tad mundane. The Romans would build dead-straight roads because that is the quickest way between two points. They didn’t build them as figure eights because they were fun for racing chariots. Despite this, additional details put into the levels such as crowds, blimps and traffic; and certain road-textures providing rumble-feedback on controllers is attention to detail that has to be commended. Real World Racing is, again, a fantastic concept. However the execution feels more like a game designed for a tablet than the PC. The gameplay simply feels too shallow to merit a solid hour or so of playthrough. It would work much better if you could have a quick 15 minute blast on the bus etc. For me, this is not necessarily the fault of the developer. It’s an idea that works better in theory than in practice.
From a technical standpoint, Real World Racing offers very little in terms of graphical options. The reason for this was discussed by a member of Playtos. Here is the direct quote: “There aren’t any graphic settings in the apart from “performance or “quality” mode. Real World Racing is based on aerial photographs that obviously have a finite resolution. We’ve balanced all the additional 3D objects and rendering effects so that they match the original resolution and quality of the source material. Allowing users to choose their own settings would result in an unpredictable/worse final result. Basically, given the quality of the original photos, RWR can’t look any better. We know that PC users are rightfully very demanding in regard to graphical customizations but in this case we had no other choice than to decide a standard for every player.”
Conclusion – Is It Worth Your Money?
If Playtos focused more on the augmenting of images, instead of filling the screen with clutter then maybe Real World Racing would work better. But for me, there is little that could redeem it. I really want to like this game, but the truth is there are better top-down racers out there. With no real narrative or aesthetic to pull the game forward other than the locations, and a roster of cars that lack any character, Real World Racing quickly becomes monotonous and joyless. It’s definitely something I’d keep my eye out for in case of a sale, but at $14.99 for a game with so much competition, it adds no real depth to the genre.
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