The Ultimate driving game for the iPhone « The BEST Apple Hardware and Software Reviews

Written By Ben Gribbin January 12th, 2010

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Are you a bit of a Nascar or Formula 1 fan? Yes? Me too. I love to watch F1, keep up to date with the news and motor racing based games are the only ones that hold my attention.

The menu for Real Racing

I love the speed, the competitiveness and challenge of constantly striving to improve.

Picking a tournament and difficulty level

When I play a racing game, I want it to feel exciting, fast and realistic. There’s only one game around thats like that. Step in Real Racing.

Car selection screen

Real Racing seems to have been one of the first driving games to offer the fantastic steering wheel / accelerator / brake pedals control set-up.

This works as you would expect. Your left thumb controls a small steering wheel, turning it as you would a real car.

Your right thumb need to move from the lower right corner (which is your gas pedal) and the top right (the brake). This set-up works great! It’s incredibly intuitive.

Real Racing offers up a Career mode, which lasts a good amount of time.

Pictures from gameplay

Essentially, you must compete in several levels of championships. Each championship gets harder, but if you do well, you are rewarded with newer and faster cars.

The cars handle in a semi-realistic manner. It is not possible to spin around from over-eagerness with the throttle. It is possible to take acute corners at full speed. However, if you fail to brake hard enough, you will shoot off a corner into gravel and grass, losing precious time.

The game is fairly realistic. It’s a kind of semi-realism mixed with half arcade play. This makes for a game you can just pick up and play.

Graphically, Real Racing is very good! The graphics are detailed and rich looking, with no lag. Obviously, it’s no 1080 HD, but it’s one of the best available for the iPhone.

Finally, we come down to the computer AI. This is where many games have fallen flat on their face. Not Real Racing. AI difficulty can be altered (as they are fairly easy to beat, and it feels like your car has a 20 mph advantage over them at some points). The AI cars occasionally crash which is good to see, and offer moderate competition.

All in all then, Real Racing is pretty good. I’d give it 4 out of 5. To get 5, Real Racing would need to include some more varied and exciting tracks. Perhaps based on real tracks.  Still, my favourite of all the racing games we reviewed.