Review: Rollercoaster Extreme

Score:
82%

Author: Barclaycard (developed by Fish Labs)

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Put aside how the developers got paid (in this case it’s Fish Labs, who’ve been praised a number of times before, including for Galaxy on Fire on the N8). That they got cash up front, instead of watching unit sales, doesn’t change the fact that they’ve created a smart, addictive, brilliantly focussed mobile game.

This is one game that runs on rails that I can really appreciate. The controls are really easy: you tilt the phone to the left, and you reach out of the coaster car with your left hand to grab the green boost/bonuses that you go past. Tilt right, you lean out to the right. You need to grab the green items, and avoid the red items, which will sap your power, slow down the coaster and lose you a lot of time.

As well as the pitching yourself left and right to grab the items, you can also duck down into the car when there are just too many red items coming down the line at you. All of this is done while the roller coaster is heading down the rails, through loops, corkscrews, chandelle turns, curves and bumps, constantly changing speed and making it just that little bit harder to see what is coming up ahead.

If you thought avoiding the red power ups was hard, the occasional washing line across the track will make a huge mess of your day!

Take this game mechanic (which is actually pretty absorbing, even though it’s mostly down to reaction time, and you start to build up a mental picture of what’s coming next as you continue to play) and throw in every single trick in the “making a game last longer” manual. That means as you start, just one of eight tracks is open to you – you’ll need to score highly on one track to open up the next track, which of course is a little bit more difficult, and needs more practice to pass through to track three. And so on.

You’ve also got merit badges to earn, such as the fastest time around each coaster track (the collected green bonuses fill up a turbo boost bar to push you round the circuit at a faster speed – great to boost yourself up a steep hill) and Artful dodger, for keeping out the way of washing lines, demolition balls, and the low bridges your coaster scoots under.

Also lifted straight from the book of keeping gamers engaged, you have your personal high score, which can be uploaded and compared to the best scores online, and a “ghost” that mimics how either you (or someone you have downloaded  from the global high score table) moved on a previous run through the coaster.

And then there are the graphics. While it doesn’t have the “HD” suffix that some people think every snazzy game in the Ovi Store needs, this title makes full use of the graphical capability of the new platform. There are moments, mostly at high speeds, where the roller coaster track just ends. That’s likely because you’re going so fast that the graphics are at the maximum draw distance – a common problem in any 3D game. It’s just a shame that a bit more priority to the track, as opposed to some of the buildings, wasn't added in for these extreme moments.

What a simple idea this game is – collect things while on a roller coaster. But it’s done with graphical skill, the panache of great game design, and it has a delightful feel of just “one more game". It’s very much recommended.

I only have one real complaint about the game, and it’s all to do with the advertising message Barclaycard have built up – I want to listen to “The Barclay Brothers” singing “Let Your Love Grow” as I play. Yes, I can play it on the Nokia Music player and it then runs in the background, but really it’s an obvious built in soundtrack!

-- Ewan Spence, Dec 2010.

Reviewed by Ewan Spence at 16:57 UTC, December 7th 2010