Game Reviews

Streetbike: Full Blast

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Streetbike: Full Blast

There are an awful lot of products on the App Store. The presentation, scope, and ambition of these titles tends to vary quite dramatically. On the whole, though, the quality bar is astoundingly high.

That’s why playing a game like Streetbike: Full Blast is a little depressing. It’s not going to win any plaudits for originality or innovation, and it doesn’t contribute anything to the genre it inhabits.

It’s just a very average racing game which has both wheels firmly planted in the middle of the road.

Knee scabs

The premise is that you’re racing on a superbike through rush hour traffic on the streets of a gleaming metropolis. You can either take part in league racing, competing in a series of challenges - overtaking a certain number of cars, completing a race without crashing, and so on - and tracks, or you can opt for a Quick Play race on a single track.

You steer with tilt-shift controls that make use of the accelerometer, and there are three buttons for brake, accelerate, and nitro boost. You can also customise the controls so that acceleration is automatic.

The graphics and sound are pretty poor, considering the capabilities of the iOS platform. The bikes and riders are distinguished purely by their colourways, and the sound effects of the engines are just a monotonous drone overlaid with a generic guitar track.

The roads and cities are similarly generic. The cars and trucks you overtake are not much better than pixellated blocks of colour, and the cityscape in the background seems oddly distended. Buildings have a tendency to just pop up on the horizon.

There’s also a lens-flare effect, apparently to heighten the realism of racing in daylight when the sun is high in the sky. This is all very well, but we can't help but feel that developer Turtles Entertainment should have invested less energy in these kinds of flourishes and more in the gameplay itself.

Burnt rubber

A typical race will involve 11 other bikes. While the tilt-shift controls might feel over-sensitive or inappropriate (though these can be tweaked in the options menu), it doesn’t matter how far you fall behind because the rubber-banded AI has a tendency to allow you to catch up and take pole position within a single lap.

This rubber-banding is modulated based on the difficulty settings – based around classes of engines – but it’s definitely in there.

Elsewhere, if you don’t feel like plugging away at the leagues to open up new tracks and earn credits for new bikes you can pay real cash outright to unlock all these features at once.

But without a multiplayer option against other non-NPCs (which is an essential feature of any modern racing game) these spoils will only be appreciated by you and you alone.

Streetbike: Full Blast is very much a racing game, and it incorporates most of the features you’d expect in a racing game. But the quality needed to set it apart is entirely lacking.

Streetbike: Full Blast

While it doesn't commit any serious gaming crimes, Streetbike is half-baked and deeply pedestrian
Score
Bulent Yusuf
Bulent Yusuf
Bulent Yusuf is a ladies man, man's man, and a man about town. His endless barrage of witty anecdotes and propensity for drink makes him a big favourite on the dinner party circuit. He likes writing, he likes gaming, and with Pocket Gamer he gets to do a bit of both.