There are a lot of slick and sexy looking racing games out there: the Gran Turismo series, Dirt, Need for Speed, etc. However, if you’re looking for a scaled back and simple racing game, then Smash Cars may be the game for you. You control an RC racer as opposed to a full scale vehicle but the symbolism rich: Smash Cars boils down to be a moderately fun but underwhelming racer.

Gameplay

The mechanics are very simple in Smash Cars: race and perform jumps as take your car through 12 single player events on a tropical island. The locales you race on range from piers to beachs and the race modes alternate between your standard pole positions against various CPU opponents and a time attack mode. The actual racing controls pretty solid and you have your standard options such as hand brake, reverse, and boost. The controls can feel a bit sluggish at times, which becomes a huge liability as you’re trying to make aggressive maneuvers while engaging your boost. The handbrake also feels a bit too tight at times, drastically killing your speed while making tight turns. Despite these quirks and shortcomings, you can still get a pretty solid handle on the car but you may find yourself making frustrating mistakes as you try to blast through a level. However, the game does give you a great sense of speed.

The other key mechanic is landing jumps. Smash Cars gives you a jump button, which you primarily use when going off a ramp. While in the air, you can flip and rotate you vehicle in slow motion -- upon a successful landing, you gain more boost. While this mechanic adds a bit of fun to the game at first, it loses its appeal soon after. It never becomes annoying to do but the novelty is gone after five or six flips. You don’t have any options while you’re airborne -- you’re basically relegated to doing s flip/spin combo by holding a 7 o’clock position on the analogue stick. Another puzzling thing is that while it is not hard to land the car properly, a lot of the times you can go out of bounds or land awkwardly due to the layout of the track. I can understand not making the game a cakewalk but if I’m being encouraged to boost off of a ramp and do crazy flips, at least give me a decent landing zone. However, a nice piece of strategy to be had in the game is to find any opportunities to do quick flips to gain small amounts of boost. It makes things more interesting than simply waiting for a ramp to appear and gives you a strategic approach to the race and track.

Also, while the game is called Smash Cars, there isn’t a lot of smashing to be done. There are items throughout the tracks, like bottles, boxes, fruit and even people, but smashing into them isn’t whole lot of fun. The crashes aren’t very spectacular and while you do get small boost from hitting some of the targets, some of them grind you to a halt. It takes a little bit of experimenting to see what is worth hitting. It would have been much simpler if hitting anything would give you boost. Also, forget about smashing into other cars, as nothing worthwhile is yielded from that. Let me smash stuff Smash Cars!

You can upgrade and tweak your vehicle as you go. There are a 3 few different car classes with different attributes in speed, handling, etc. You can also get different chassis styles and colors which allow you to personalize your vehicle. It’s great that these options exist but there is not a whole lot that sets everything apart. That is the underlying problem with Smash Cars: it’s a very simple and generic experience.

Graphics and Audio

Smash Cars has very vibrant visuals and looks good on an HD screen. While there is nothing superbly technical about the look of the game, everything is rendered nicely with little pop-ups or clipping. The only bizarre graphical hitch is when you plow through a box -- the box pieces impair your vision momentarily, whereas it would have been more ideal for the pieces to go flying off to the side or become transparent. The environments look good and nicely capture the island theme of the game. However, some locales outside of the island would have spiced up the variety. The game maintains great visuals when you’re boosting and really gives you the impression that you’re going extremely fast. The audio is standard fare: there is nothing annoying about the music or sound effects it can be a bit bland. It sounds like it came straight off of a production CD.

Value

Content for Smash Cars is low, even for a downloadable game. You only get 12 single-player tracks and some are mirrored ones at that. Gameplay options are skimpy as well -- you have no multiplayer offline and the online offering is bare bones -- a 6 way race on any of the single player tracks. You can host or join a game but be warned -- there weren’t many racers online while I was reviewing the game and the online infrastructure can get tedious, as after every race you have to join or create a new match. Future expansions would help this game immensely but as for now, you’re getting a thin experience.

Conclusion

Smash Cars is ultimately an underwhelming experience. The game looks good and is simple to play but there is nothing exciting or innovative about the title. The flipping/smashing gimmick gets old very quickly and the lack of tracks and gameplay modes (both offline and online) really hurt the cost value of the game. Future downloads would be great to give you more variety but even with more stages and game modes, the core gameplay is average at best.