Real World Racing

Developer: Playstos Entertainment

Steam Release: N/A

Usual Price: -

Hours Played: ~ 4.0

Similar To: Little Racers Street / Reckless Racing / Ultimate Racing 2D

Rating: 4/5 Parsnips

* This game is no longer available on Steam.

GAMEPLAY

This game is the poorer cousin to the more complete and polished Little Racers Street and is no longer available on Steam but can still be purchased elsewhere. As its name suggests it takes place in the streets of the major cities of Europe from London, Rome and Berlin to Prague, Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm. Like LRS, you'll enter events, races and time-trials by driving your chosen car at high speeds along roads in top-down view. Handling is much the same as in LRS meaning it has an arcade feel that handles nicely for the casual player and is very forgiving round corners. The Career mode, including quite an involved tutorial to get you started, leads you through six championships with each having about a dozen events where you'll race and compete in time-trials for the silver and gold award.
 

BALANCE & PACE

Career mode is where you'll spend time initially as this unlocks races and time-trials in the Arcade mode. Here, as well as the conventional stuff, you'll also compete in checkpoint races (solo) and survival races (with A.I. opponents). Compared to other racers, the A.I. is probably RWR's weak point as they'll generally perform solidly on the many straights but lack any sort of aggression around the sharp bends and it's at these points where you can usually breeze past them. Arcade is where you can compete in any city and on any unlockable track to race or engage in time-trials for the fastest time. Events are restricted to class but you can buy cars at the garage with prize money as you go. Cars are graded on handling, top speed and acceleration etc so you can experiment and cross-reference to get the one that suits your style. 
       

PRESENTATION & DESIGN

Judging on menu-design alone, and their ease of use and navigation, RWR stands up pretty well. The Arcade portion of the game shows each city and its available tracks along with the best time clearly displayed for each. Information is displayed nicely and cars are lined up conveniently underneath the map of the city ready to instantly dive in. Menus for the Career mode, likewise are intuitive and user-friendly. It's the bland and frankly blurry and uninspiring graphics that are a bit of a let-down. Also with limiting tile-sets, apart from the odd building, the cities themselves are not that well distinguished from each. You'll pass the same huge layouts and stretches that you encountered in Oslo, London and Berlin etc. To compare each cars' performance against each other there is a very welcome ghost-car feature. 
 

PROGRESS SYSTEM

A rather lengthy tutorial of 7 events in Career mode will greet you at first. This teaches you about steering, slip-streaming and drifting. You'll then jump into the first of five championships where you'll compete in 13 unlockable events. These vary from races and time-trials to checkpoint and survival races. Each one has objectives that will reward you with either a silver or gold cup. You accumulate cash prizes that you can then spend on cars at the garage. These cannot be upgraded but are ranked out-of-ten on performance such as speed, acceleration and handling etc. Arcade features standalone races or time-trials that you can select while scrolling through a screen for each city. There are five classes of vehicle altogether so beating best times while purchasing a better quality car is the way to go.    

CONCLUSION

In all honesty, there are more decent top-down racers out there than RWR. While it has a few things going for it like checkpoint times and a ghost-car feature, its low-quality graphics, lack of variety in track design and sheer blandness makes it really hard to compete with the others such as Reckless Racing. Any attempt, on the Steam version, to view the leaderboard or enter multiplayer mode simply crashes the computer requiring a full-restart and whether this is the reason it was taken off Steam or whether it is caused because it's no longer on Steam will no doubt bring up the red flag anyway. Still, for those curious or who want to see how well it holds up for themselves, it comes at a very reasonable price from other distributors.