The price of iPhone apps and games has been a hot topic in the games industry of late, those few ‘expensive’ titles on the service gaining praise, or dismissal for their acceptance of the iTunes model. The latest of these is 2XL ATV Offroad is the latest of these titles, near breaking the £5 barrier on price, but said to pack in the same amount of content as a fully priced PSP game. Can ATVs really effectively translate to mobile?
It’s hard to talk about Offroad and not mention how packed full of content the game is. With 12 courses to choose from, and the ability to customise your ATV and driver, the game includes both Race, and freestyle events. The Freestyle sections fail to live up to the excellent races though, due to how difficult it can be to pull off certain tricks, and the lack of direction in these stages.
The races are great fun though, with racers bouncing off each other, fighting to cross the finish line alive. It can get pretty brutal on the track too, with your driver flying off across the screen if you fail to avoid obstacles like bollards and other drivers. With a career mode that takes you across all the courses the game offers-available in three difficulties-along with Arcade and local multiplayer options, there’s plenty of content to experience here.
All of this content looks great too, the ATVs and drivers animations being realistic enough to make you forget you’re playing on a phone. The environments can become blurry when in open spaces-especially prevalent in freestyle mode-but this does little to detract from the excellent presentation here. Not having custom music-i.e. iPod music-is frustrating though, as the repetitive tunes featured here get tiring very quickly.
The game looks best when in motion, difficult to achieve when you’re constantly turning the system from side to side. Once again, 2XL ATV Offroad is a motion controlled racing title, and while this works just as well as ever, the same problems that hinder other racers is present here. Turing on auto accelerate helped to alleviate some of these issues, but when trying to jump, and then perform tricks-both actions found at the sides of the screen-it can get frustrating. This is a real shame as if the trick system had been simpler, the actual racing could shine through to show just how great a game this is.
2XL ATV Offroad is just about worth the price tag, it’s an iPhone game I will be coming back to whenever I want a proper ‘game’ to play on the go, the problems never becoming too troublesome to cope. £4.99 may seem expensive, but when you consider that ATV games go for £30 on PSP, this is a worthy purchase.
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