![]() ![]() I counted more than 45 in total, with many of them making fun references to games and other pop culture. There are tons of boats to unlock and buy through the course of the game as well, each with different parameters, weapons, and potential upgrades. If you’re foolish with your coins, you might not be able to afford the best one right off the hop, but you will certainly be able to afford something. The game is even good about chucking coins at you in the lead-up to moving to the next league, since you will have to buy a new boat from that license class to compete. This means you can always upgrade your boat if you’re having trouble cracking an event, ensuring you never get stuck too badly. Coins come in at a pretty slow rate relative to the cost of new boats if you’re losing events completely, but wrenches come along pretty steadily no matter your fortunes. Racing earns you both coins and wrenches which can be used to buy new vehicles and upgrade existing ones. The AI is strong but beatable, and even if you lose, you’ll still earn something that will help you come back a little stronger. This presents another reason to take to the air, since you’re a lot harder to hit when you’re not on the water. Most of the time, getting blown up will only cost you a little time, but in certain events, you only get one chance, so it’s a good idea to keep an eye on your armor and sometimes slow down so that you can be the predator instead of the prey. Instead, it’s the weapons you need to be wary of. ![]() You can actually pass through each other quite harmlessly. You’ll also have to keep an eye on your opponents, but not because of collisions or anything like that. The waves are an elegant way of handling the fact that the perspective doesn’t allow for turns, keeping you busy all throughout each race. You’ll also get weapons and defense items before too long, and those come with their own buttons, but even at that point, it’s still very easy to play. You have to pay constant attention to what’s in front of you to know when to hold and release, so even with simple controls, the game has a lot of challenge to it. Sometimes, you will want to take to the air to avoid obstacles or collect items, but even there, you can accelerate your drop by releasing the button. The key is to briefly release the button as you’re going up a wave, which sticks you to it and allows you to maintain your speed. If you just hold the accelerate button, you’ll catch huge air off of waves, and while that looks cool, it’s usually not good for your speed. It kind of takes some cues from Tiny Wings ($1.99) in that you’re tapping and holding the button according to the terrain rolling out in front of you, but the way it works in practice is very different. It’s easy enough to work the basic controls, but there’s a lot of technique involved in playing well. The amount of content in the game is quite hefty, with lots of stuff to clear and unlock. You can also run time trials to get extra practice, or jump into the game’s arcade mode where you can set up custom races. They’ll often have special rules or stipulations, so you’re constantly having to learn new tricks to advance, keeping the game fresh all the way through. The amount of events varies between leagues, but in total, there are more than 50 events set across the game’s 16 tracks. The basic structure of the game has you clearing small tutorial-like missions to earn a license, which then gives you access to a particular league and the group of boats that go with it. Pixel Boat Rush is a boat-racing game with an 8-bit visual style that uses a side-view of the action, with the waves looking more like rolling hills than water. You have to find other ways to bring the beautiful tension that makes racing so compelling, and that’s just what Pixel Boat Rush ($0.99) sets out to do. ![]() If there is no depth, there’s no passing, no hairpin turns, no drafting, and collisions become hard to sort out. There are lots of reasons as to why that was likely the case, but it mostly comes down to the simple idea that it’s hard to express the excitement of racing from that point of view. Racers that opted for a strict, flat side-view to the action were historically pretty rare outside of obstacle course time-attacks like Motocross Maniacs. Hardware that couldn’t manage said tricks tended to have racers that skewed the perspective to at least offer some sort of visual depth. Really thinking about it, racing is one of the genres that begged the most for polygons, having already spent years working in pseudo-3D with scaling sprites and optical tricks. I’ve often felt that the genre that perhaps benefited the most from the jump from 2D to 3D was racing. ![]()
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