Real Racing 3: Great looking, but boring

The highly anticipated racing simulation game for iOS and Android is finally out worldwide. I’ve been playing the NZ version for a few weeks and this is what I’ve got to say about it…

• The graphics are stunning. I’ve played it mostly on a retina iPad and iPhone 4S and it looks spectacular in practically any scene in the game. The cars, however, tend to look very blocky when they’re far away from you, even when the trees and other objects look fine. Also, there are absolutely no people anywhere around the race track, other than one or two technicians. And even they aren’t looking in the direction of your car, making you feel left out and alone. Which brings me to the next point…
• You ARE alone. All the multiplayer in the game is fake. It’s “Time Shifted Multiplayer”, which means the game stores your time and basic driving style and lets other people race with those clones. Even you’re racing against bots with times similar to your friends. The upside is that you can play with anyone, anytime, but the downside is that you’ll never really feel like you’re racing a real person, because you’re not. Everyone else is driving according to the standard race line, lining up behind each other at the bends. This makes the gameplay extremely sterile and boring.
• There are several different kinds of races like cup, elimination, speed snap, head to head, endurance, autocross, speed record, etc. BUT ALL OF THEM ARE THE SAME in the sense that neither of them requires any special strategy or tactics to win – you just have to drive fast and get ahead of everyone. The only exception is the drag race mode, which you have to play in manual mode, shifting up gears at the right time.
• The first several tiers and car classes offer very average cars, which, even after upgrading to the max, don’t really go too fast. You can almost play this game while watching TV or reading a book, because nothing untoward can happen. This changes as you cross the 350kmph car classes, but it will take you several weeks of constant playing to get there, and you’re most likely going to fall asleep before you accumulate that much cash.
• The ‘freemium’ concept that everyone’s complaining about isn’t as bad as most websites are making it sound. You can afford to wait five to thirty minutes between a few races for your car to get upgraded or repaired. This also prevents you from playing too many similar races and getting bored too quickly. The way to get around this is to save up the money and buy multiple cars in each tier, so you can race with one car while the other is getting worked upon.
• Dumb trick: Every race can be replayed an unlimited number of times, giving you reward cash and driver level-up points each time. The drag races are the quickest and easiest and give you about In half an hour, you can make How do you think I bought the Koenigsegg Agera R?

That’s a lot more than I was originally playing to say about this game. In a nut-bolt-shell: The game looks superb, but it’s highly boring for the first several weeks of playing with regular cars and you’ll never really play with any real people online.

Still, it’s not too shabby for a free game.