Game Review: Reckless Racing 2

As if the racing in the previous game wasn’t enough, now there’s even more recklessness with Reckless Racing 2.

Racing games have a pretty high bar on Android with games like Real Racing 2 and Need for Speed, one could wonder how a smaller developer could release something competitive and engaging in this market. History has proven that you should never count out the little guy and Reckless Racking 2 doesn’t go toe to toe with these other racers and instead rises above them with an overhead view and still keeps the action just as engaging.

Players of the previous game won’t find the overhead setup anything new and might be a little disappointed to hear that Reckless Racing 2 takes itself a little more seriously in both level design and features. Gone are the frequent ramps and delivery mode (where you had to run between points on a large map) but in their place is more maps, vehicles and a new career mode with upgrade system. The career is broken down into a set of races, points are awarded for your position and the racer with the most points at the end of the set wins a larger cash bonus that can be spent on purchasing one of the seventeen available cars (eighteen including the one you start with) or purchasing upgrades. Every car is given a performance rating and each set of races requires that your car be under the maximum requirement, so you’ll be having to make decisions about if you want to pick an engine upgrade or a new set of tires to stop from going over the rating, or just saving up for a new car.

The racing is still very much about sliding fast around corners although there’s more actual racetrack than before and to get the best results you’ll find yourself making small adjustments to your vehicles specs when handling is less of a concern. Difficulty isn’t something that is usually a problem as long as you replay a few older races to make sure your car has enough tuning but the adaptive difficulty does its best to make things interesting without being unfair. This adaptive difficulty means that if you’re not wanting to tweak your car for a race it’s not necessary, although adding new parts is kept very simple. Also if you really don’t want to be upgrading and purchasing new cars then there’s the arcade mode that presents you with forty races to complete using the different cars from the main campaign.

There’s only six different areas to race in so you won’t be experiencing a lot of variety in the background but fortunately each area has four different routes that are available giving a couple of dozen unique circuits to race on. Each one of these areas is unique in their own way, even if it’s nothing drastic they all look fantastic and have plenty of things that you’ll be crashing into and sending flying across the track. The physics add greatly to the presentation of the game; swinging loosely around a corner and scattering a row of bollards looks and feels great, along with the rest of the game.

Online multiplayer is included and while quick to get into, has more than a few drawbacks that make it a frustrating experience. There’s no ability to put restrictions on car classes like the main campaign, so new players might find themselves completely outclassed by faster racers. There’s also no winnings to be won in multiplayer or track voting, it’s as simple as picking a track, laps and car and then waiting for up to three other players to join. Once inside the race the issues don’t stop as network performance causes cars to jump around the screen, which would be tolerable if it there was an option to disable collisions rather than getting knocked aside by a car that seemed to appear out of nowhere.

Recklesss Racing 2 is the most complete overhead racer available, which could be most improved by there being more content and more crazy.

[box_light]NOTE: While preparing this review I experienced two complete losses of save game data. This doesn’t appear to be completely isolated and until this is fixed rooted users should look into keeping a save backup if possible.[/box_light]