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In-Depth Review
Days of Thunder
Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 1:02 PM - by Bob LeVitus
I have tried many of the available racing games for the iPhone. While some -- such as Asphalt 4: Elite Racing and Fastlane Street Racing -- have awesome graphics and others -- like Crash Bandocoot Nitro Kart 3D, Cro-Mag Rally, and Wingnuts Moto Chaser -- are cartoon-ish but none the less fun, I've yet to finish a single one of them. I play for a little while and grow either frustrated or bored. So I was surprised that Freeverse's Days of Thunder has maintained my interest for several weeks and that after just a few more races I'll have completed the final, most grueling level, the Endurance Circuit.
Here's how it goes... It's NASCAR racing so the tracks are mostly oval with no sharp turns. Each race pits you against 7 opponents for 10 laps. Do well enough and you can advance to a higher level (circuit).
Controls are as follows:
- Tilt your iPhone or iPod touch to steer.
- Press the accelerator pedal in the lower right corner of the screen to go.
- Press the brake pedal in the lower left corner of the screen to slow down.
- When you have taken a lot of damage, make a pit stop by tapping the Pit icon that appears on the left side of the screen on the straightaway near the start/finish line.
- Follow an opponent closely (draft) to earn a speed boost.
- When the speed boost hammer icon appears on the right side of the screen, tap it to put down the hammer and race past some (or many) opponents.
You start each race at the back of the pack in 8th place as shown above. The bar in the upper right corner (above the laps and place indicators) tells you how much "health" your car has remaining. When your health gets low, you need to make a pit stop or risk having your car blow up. The relative health of competitors' cars, which you can see when you pull behind them, is a red and green bar above them. In the picture above, the 7th place car has a bar that's almost all red, which means if I crash into him once or twice he's going to blow up, which puts him out of the race for a short time.
This is what blowing up an opponent looks like:
The 5th and 6th place cars, on the other hand, display health bars that are mostly green, so they'll take a lot more damage before they explode.
Repeat for ten laps, then do it again and again.
Here are a couple more pictures for your edification and enjoyment.
The pits are on the straightaway near the start/finish line. When you've taken a lot of damage, like this:
You need to make a pit stop. When you do, other cars may pass you (the red indicator on the left below) as your car is healed (green indicator on the right below).
Before I wrote this review I gave some thought to what makes Days of Thunder so much more engaging than some of the other racing games I've tried. It's not the graphics. They're OK but I've seen better. It's not the story line. Although there is one I mostly ignore it. And it's not the physics. Although they're perfect for the game, they're pretty unrealistic.
So what's so good about Days of Thunder? The answer that it brings together a perfect storm of features:
- Each race is relatively quick -- under 5 minutes.
- There aren't many controls to deal with -- accelerator, brake, "put down the hammer," and Pit..
- The accelerometer (turning) controls are well-balanced -- not too sensitive but not too mushy either.
- There is strategy involved -- it's not just "put the pedal to the metal and see how fast you can go." You have to plan pit stops carefully and know when to "trade paint" with opponents (and more importantly, when not to).
and last but not least...
- When you blow up an opponent, the explosions are cool.
The only thing that keeps Days of Thunder from a five star rating is a single vexing issue that occurs too often for me to overlook. That issue is that it quits unexpectedly far too frequently. Once it does I usually have to restart my iPhone to fix it and that's not good.
That said, when it's good, it's very, very good, but when bad and quitting in the middle of a race, it sucks big time.
The Bottom Line
Days of Thunder is the most enjoyable racing game I've tried in spite of its quitting unexpectedly most often than I'd like. Even so, it's still easily worth the three bucks.
Just The Facts
Pros:
Really fun, relatively easy to learn but not so easy to master, short races.
Cons:
Crashes occasionally.
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