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Coming off the success of Super Stickman Golf, everyone had high expectations of Lunar Racer. I think those expectations were met, but it didn’t go much farther than meet them, unforunately. Those who are not fans of racing will still enjoy this, much like the non-fans of golf (me) enjoyed Super Stickman Golf.

You, the racer, start off in a transport ship, along with three opponents. When the light turns green, you are all dropped out of the ship and onto a planet, to which you are pulled by gravity. The difficulty of the opponent racers is just right for what it should be, and even on your first race you don’t feel left behind. Each race lasts about 60-90 seconds and is hectic all the way through. There are powerups to be had throughout the track, which randomly give the player or opponent more nitro, a space car seeking rocket, a spike that can be dropped behind you, a bubble shield, or a space car seeking rocket that hits everyone in front of the shooter. Each time a victim is hit, it gets stopped, whether it be mid air or on ground, and resumes after 1-2 seconds.

The controls are extremely simple and easy to pick up. Nitro is used by tapping the right side of the screen, and to be pulled back to the planet faster, when in the air, tap the left side of the screen. Any game focused on tilt controls isn’t generally asked for, or wanted on an iPad because of the size; but the devs have made the default sensitivity just right. The tilting sensitivity is high, but perfectly done, I had no want to adjust them, whatsoever. Which is a good thing, because, unforunately, there are no customization options, spare the ability to mute the sound and/or music.

Lunar Racer has a total of twelve tracks to unlock, all spread out into different planets/environments. To unlock said tracks you must get a certain total amount of stars. Stars are earned by gettings first (three stars) second (two stars) or third (one star) on any given track. Sadly, two of the tracks can only be unlocked by gettting five or ten wins in multiplayer, which is only local at the moment. So if you don’t have a friend who would help you out, or another device, you’re out of luck. Each track varies greatly by terrain and environment, and gives the racer a whole new experience each race.

If you’re good enough to get three stars on a track in Amateur Tour, you unlock Pro Tour which has much smarter and seemingly faster opponents. The challenge presented in Pro Tour is highly welcomed since the opponents in Amateur Tour get easy to beat after playing for a couple of hours.

Multiplayer is included in the game, but unfortunately its only local multiplayer at the moment. The developers have said, on twitter, that they are working on global, online multiplayer; however. If done right, much like Super Stickman Golf, online multiplayer would make this game just so much more fun, not that it even needs it.

At the start of every race you are given a set amount of nitro, this nitro is a key element to winning a race so you, as the racer, must put it to good use to earn more nitro by doing flips, or by doing perfect landings.

One of the many things that make this game good, is the insanely extensive garage. From what I’ve seen so far, there are at least ten body types, five different colors, and ten different wheels. Comsetic upgrades are bought with coins and go up in price for each successive one you buy. Here is a list of things that you can change with your space car – all cosmetic.

– Body Type
– Body Color
– Canopy Color
– Wheel Type
– Nitro Animation

In order to buy things from this garage, you collect coins which float around in the track, in each race there are 50-200 coins, depending on the track. If you complete at least one of three unique challenges in each track, you get a multiplier which can potentially give you 4X the coins you collected. 2X for completing one challenge, 3X for completing two, and 4X for completing all three. The first time you manage to complete all three challenges, whether it be in seperate races or all in one race, you are rewarded with a bonus round. Bonus rounds put you on a planet with stars all round, and unlimited nitro. An average bonus round can get you around 600 stars. The game also features (although some may not call it a feature) an in-app purchase store with which you can buy more cosmetic stuff, although obviously not needed.

Achievements and leaderboards are done through both GameCenter and OpenFeint, a feature most devs today are putting in their games. Leaderboards show who have the fastest time for each level. Lunar Racer has a total of 22 achievements which can be obtained by doing a specific number of spins, firing a number of rockets, and other feats that can be accomplished by simply playing the game normally.

Varying tracks, a crazy amount of cosmetic stuff to do to your car, and gameplay that will have you wanting for more, are very good reasons to pick Lunar Racer up – now!

Silvertree Media’s first iOS release, Cordy, made quite an impression on gamers with it’s fantastic graphics, animations, music and gameplay. However, those who loved Cordy might end up wondering why Silvertree decided to take their second release, Sleepy Jack, in a more casual direction with the gameplay. Sleepy Jack feels more like a Disney’d-up Tunnel Shoot than anything else, having your character go through stages collecting orbs, shooting enemies and objects trying to block your path, and trying to beat level times. Not to say that Sleepy Jack isn’t worth playing, or that if you’ve got plenty of tunnel shooters, that you’re not missing anything if you skip on it, because it does offer up some very top notch gameplay, but those of you who were hoping for something a little more creative based on your experience with Cordy will most likely be disappointed at first.

Sleepy Jack puts you inside the dreams of Jack, the kid who owns the toy, Cordy. Each night, you’ll control Jack as he flies through 40 levels, split up across 4 different worlds. Each level has a 3 star ranking system, with one star for completion, one for collecting a certain amount of the level’s orbs, and another for beating the level’s par time. There are 3 different control schemes, one having virtual buttons for movement, using a double tap to make Jack do a barrel roll, one where you can hold on the left or right side of the screen for which direction you want Jack to move, and then swiping in the gameplay area to get him to perform a barrel roll, and tilt controls, which also give you two buttons, one on each side for the direction you would like Jack to do a barrel roll in. While you’re going through the stages, you’ll sometimes be able to fire projectiles. This is done automatically when your fingers are on the screen with the two touch screen controls. For the tilt controls, you’ll need to tap on the screen when you want to shoot. All three control options fit the game very well. In fact, I’m having a hard time finding out which control scheme I prefer, they are all put together that well.

It would be great to see some additional modes added in the future, as tunnel racers are generally known for having more than one mode. Maybe a zen mode, where you didn’t have to worry about any obsticles or enemies, and could just zone out to the amazingly beautiful graphics, or a full on chaos mode where some of the harder enemy battles were thrown at you in waves, and you survived as long as you could with one life. There’s loads of possibilities when it comes to secondary modes in a tunnel racer game. It would also be great to see some unlockable characters, maybe be able to play with Cordy, and other toys that Jack owns. Even though there is a high replay value with the game already, it would just be nice to have some more variety with the gameplay.

Right now, Sleepy Jack is priced at it’s launch sale price, $0.99, which, even during December, is a fantastic price for this high-quality game. Yes, it is a tunnel racer, yes tunnel racers are not known for their deep gameplay, but once you look past the genre it’s in, and actually start playing it, and progressing through the game, you really start to see how much depth there really is. On top of the 3 star rankings for each level, which provide tons of replay value, there are 3 different difficulties (which also makes the game more accessible to younger gamers, as well as hardcore players), and Game Center + OpenFeint integration. Within GameCenter, there are leaderboards for the first 30 levels, as well as an Overall Score board, and OpenFeint has a board for every level, as well as an Overall Score leaderboard, along with both having 44 achievements. Silvertree Media can add their second title, Sleepy Jack, to that list of top notch, high quality, amazingly beautiful games that they started on with Cordy. I can’t wait to see what they’ll bring us in the future.

The racing genre on the App Store has been dominated by games like Real Racing, Asphalt, and Need For Speed.  It’s time to welcome a new top dog, Mini Motor Racing. This masterpiece by the Binary Mill combines crazy arcade racing with visual glory and customization to create a truly amazing gaming experience.
If there is one thing that I would boast about Mini Motor Racing, it would have to be the aesthetics.  This game is a real treat for the eyes as well as the ears. Extremely detailed cars and tracks, along with beautifully fluid menus make MMR a joy to play. The upbeat music fits perfectly with the wacky vibe and the tune has been stuck in my head for the past few days.

Controls are a huge plus as well.  The gods over at the Binary Mill went all out with 4 different control methods ranging from a simple steering wheel, to a slider bar. The steering wheel has been perfect for me so far, but the other methods work just as well.  Also, you can turn auto-accelerate on or off to make the experience a little more realistic. With 4 control options, there is bound to be one that will work for just about everybody.
Moving on to the heart of Mini Motor Racing, there are multiple game modes including Championship, Quick Race, and Multiplayer. Championship mode consists of a whopping 120 race career which goes from normal events to feature cups like the “Fruit Ninja Cup” and the “Holiday Cup”.  Quick race works as it normally would.  You can “quickly” jump right into a race and practice your skills.  Multiplayer is limited to local WiFi and Bluetooth right now, but an online mode should be up and running soon.

To those who love customization, you will love Mini Motor Racing.  The game has over 20 tracks to choose from, all of which are absolutely gorgeous, and 13 cars to unlock.  The tracks are rather short, but they are designed to encourage rough play.  You will inevitably find yourself ramming your opponents out of the way and nitro-boosting your way to first place as you zip around corners.  The cars range in design, but they are all very detailed.  Some upgrades that are available are nitro boosts, top speed, handling, and acceleration. Upgrades are purchased with in-game cash that is earned by winning races. The wide variety of cars and tracks adds to MMR’s long list of awesome features.
Check out the launch trailer for Mini Motor Racing. If our review didn’t get you pumped up for the game, then the trailer definitely will.

I definitely recommend picking up Mini Motor Racing. The standard and HD versions are separate, weighing in at $1.99 and $3.99 respectively.

Endless jumping games, like MegaJump, Doodle Jump, and the whole slew of them you can find in the AppStore, have gained a pretty large following over the years, hell, even my kids cell-phones came with Doodle Jump pre-installed on them. But finding these types of games offering something new to the mix is pretty rare. However, Krivorukoff LLP has noticed this, and done something about it with their first iOS release, Mad Rush.

You’ll embark on a journey to become the greatest racer in the universe, while defending your home from the evil Mr. Storm. Guiding your rabbit in races against 10 different characters, with 3 different races each, evolving your character through leveling up and distributing points, and learning more about the rabbits destiny as you progress through the game. To beat your opponents, you’ll need to collect egg looking objects in order to speed up. You can bump against your opponent, pushing them into hazards, or out of the way of a power-up, and the first one to cross the finish line wins.

Now, generally, the controls, as well as the smoothness of the gameplay come into question quite a bit. With Mad Rush, both are top notch. Nice, tight controls make weaving left and right, and avoiding the hazards that await you comes naturally, while the gameplay is buttery smooth, with no lag or frameskips to disrupt you while you’re playing. Considering the game runs at a pretty quick pace, these aspects are pretty impressive.

Mad Rush is supported by GameCenter, having a top collective score leader board, but no achievements, and no time boards, which would be nice. However, something that will make the game exceptional once it’s added is multiplayer gameplay. According to the developers, you will soon be able to compete head to head against your friends in multiplayer races. This would shoot the replay and gameplay entertainment values through the roof. Sadly though, it’s not part of the game yet, so we can’t seriously consider it as part of the review. But if it is added in the future, you can be sure that we’ll let you know, and push you guys to seriously consider buying this title. Right now, the gameplay is great, and the replay value is there with the collective score leader board, though a lot of players don’t like leader boards that collectively add up how many points you’ve gotten while playing the game, because the #1 spot could, hypothetically, just replay the first race over and over again, eventually achieving the #1 spot, instead of the person who has the highest score on each of the levels. Having IAPs which give players an advantage is also generally frowned upon, but considering how much extra stuff you get for a dollar, it’s not really worth fussing over. I know when I put Mad Rush on my kid’s devices, I’ll probably end up buying the IAP just so that they can play the game without too much difficulty, and it’s kind of hard not to keep that in mind when talking about IAP additions for a game like this. But with the leveling up system, and abilities to enhance, along with the difficulty of the later races, the replay value is there. $0.99 is a great price for a title that’s a great addition to the MegaJump type genre.

Mad Rush gets a score of 4 out of 5.

Side-scrolling racers have become pretty popular among iOS gamers over the last couple years. They seem to have a perfect amount of casual gameplay mixed with enough challenging high-score chasing to keep almost all gamers satisfied. The genre seems to be growing, though very, very slowly. Generally, with each new addition to the genre, there will be a little upgrade with graphics, some tweak in the gameplay, maybe an added power-up, but never really a huge jump like what POWapp has done with their latest release, Flip Riders. In this side-scrolling, star collecting racer, awesome graphics, tight controls, and some amazing physics have totally set a new standard for the side-scrolling racer genre.

Right now, there are 30 levels spread out across 6 different environments, with 3 stars to earn in each level, and each new environment can be unlocked with every 10 stars you earn. Stars are given to you depending on how many you snagged throughout each of the levels. 100% of the stars in the level will give you 3 stars, between 50% and 99% of the stars will give you 2 stars, and less than 50% of the stars will earn you 1 star. Once you unlock a new world, you can play all 5 of the new tracks in any order you like, so if you get stuck on one in particular, you can skip it and come back to it later, or even skip it all together, going through the rest of the game before coming back to it so long as you get 10 stars collectively throughout the other levels in the world. There are also 5 different characters to start out with, along with 5 more characters that you can unlock, each one becoming available once you open up another world. Each of the original 5 riders you’ll be able to use when you first start up the game has an experience bar that fills up as you progress through the game. This adds quite a bit of replay value, as filling up all of the riders bars will require you to play through the whole game with each of the riders. Something that would be nice to see would be stats and experience bars for the unlockable riders in a future update.

But, we all know that graphics are far from everything when it comes to gaming. Physics on the other hand, can make or break a game from the first seconds of gameplay, and Flip Riders has some of the best physics of any side-scrolling racer I’ve ever played. The rag doll physics along with a perfect feeling of weight for the racers helps create some extremely smooth gameplay. The objects in the world however, do not really have much weight, as you’re able to push trucks off to the side, and sometimes sharks hit bridges and flop around like little stiff fish, but the racers bikes and the way they interact with most objects in the levels, like the bridges, ramps, loops and hills is all pretty damn close to perfect.

With Flip Racers having all of this going for it, it’s pretty hard to find any reasons why people would not like the game. But there are a few things that people might not like. The game can be extremely challenging. Almost every level will take multiple play throughs, each time getting a little further, being able to see what the next obstacle in the level is, only to smash right into it, miss-time a flip, speed into a hazard, or not have enough speed to make the next jump, resulting in you needing to start all the way back at the beginning of the level, needing to go through all the obstacles you already spent quite a bit of time trying to get through already. Dying 20-30 times in one level can be a fairly common occurrence, and the fact that each of the levels almost requires you to memorize them in order to make it through them can take away quite a bit of fun from the gameplay. This does, however, add an insane amount of replayabilty to the game, as it’s not something you can just fly through, and once you do get through it, you’ll have plenty of stars to go back and try and snag. It’s comparable to Reckless Getaway in this challenging, needing to memorize, multiple plays kind of gameplay that POWapps has incorporated into Flip Riders. But, for a lot of gamers, this is the icing on the cake, and can be a huge reason why they’ll end up loving the game. It just depends on your preferences. However, making it so that players can see further ahead of them would help out immensely, maybe being able to zoom out a little bit would help a lot of casual players not get so frustrated with the difficulty of the game.

Right now, Flip Riders is $0.99, but that’s a launch price, and will go up on October 23rd. The game is Universal, and does have GameCenter integration with 13 different leader boards, one for the total score of each world as well as one for the total times for each world, and an overall score leader board. There’s also 21 achievements that will take quite a bit of skill to unlock. This, on top of the already insane amount of replay value makes Flip Riders a no-brainer MUST buy for fans of the racing genre. There’s also a bit of platforming elements added, with the jump button, and it can sometimes feel like a mix of a racer and Sonic the Hedgehog, which is not very surprising, as the developers first game was a platformer, by the name of Shadow Candy: Sugar Rush. POWapps has definitely raised the bar within the side-scrolling racer genre, and with games like this, jAggy Race and Dream Track Nation, the future of side-scrolling racers is looking exceedingly bright.

Flip Riders gets a score of 8 out of 10.

QuBIT, a crystal smashing, color matching racer from Secret Sauce Studios, just got it’s 1.2.0 update, and it’s a big one! This debut release from the UK company caught my attention the moment I saw the release trailer. I ended up staying up the night of it’s release to check it out, and even ended up updating my iPod from iOS 4.0 to iOS 4.3, which I previously swore I would never do for any game. But boy was I so happy that I finally did.

QuBIT turned out to be one of the best and most original racing games I had ever experienced. Everything from the graphics to the gameplay, scoring to the matching, down to the racing, I was completely hooked, and found it hard to play anything else for the first two weeks I had the game on my device. Then the obsession faded, like it does, until last Friday, the 16th, when Secret Sauce released it’s version 1.2.0 update, and the love affair was re-kindled.

Here’s a list of the new features;

–Retina Display Support

–New game mode, Surge

–2 new QuBOTs, QuBYT, and QuTI

–Solid Gold Plated Bot for those who bought the game before it went free back in July

and of course

–QuBIT is now FREE, with the new Surge Mode, and two new characters available through IAP.

Secret Sauce’s decision to make the previously $0.99 app, free, was not one that was taken lightly. Within the first week of the release, 50% of the activity on the leaderboards was from pirated copies. Cracked software has, is, and will always, be a problem for game developers, but it’s especially sad when it happens to such a great game made by such a great development team. With every issue brought up on the Touch Arcade and Secret Sauce Forums, the team has been there to swiftly and quickly address the issue, sending out a fix as soon as possible, and listening to what the gamers had to say.

So here’s hoping that the change to go free does help fight the onslaught of cracked copies, and those of you who bought QuBIT before it went free back in July, or even after it went free, only to see the part of the game that you paid for go free, will be glad to know that your money went back into the development of the game, and the in app purchase of the new Surge Mode, new characters, and unlockables, along with the Retina Display addition, is well worth another $0.99. Especially when coming from such a dedicated developer, who’s sure to put that money back into amazing, mind-bending games for it’s fans, and new-customers.

Be sure and check out QuBIT, now that’s free, you’ve got nothing to loose, except of course, for a buck that you’ll most likely end up spending on the Surge Mode once you get hooked on the Classic Mode that’s, to say the least, VERY addicting. We here at The App Shack wish Secret Sauce the best of luck with this new pricing set-up, and with the game, as it’s one of our favorites.

Download QuBIT From The iTunes Store By Clicking Here

You can also check out the Secret Sauce team’s blog/forum/webpage at http://www.secretsauce.co/