2XL ATV Offroad: review

Posted by R.Furie in iPhone, Reviews | 0 comments

Title

Once upon a time gaming was a bit like cinema! Some of us had fancy new televisions in our living rooms but it was usually a black and white one, so if you wanted top quality ‘Technicolour’ viewing you had to go to the cinema. What does this have to do with gaming? Well, in a similar way if you wanted top quality graphics and sound, you had to go to the arcades. Games in homes were two/three colour affairs with moving squares and not much else. Flash forward 25-30 years and look at what we have; games we can carry with us that have graphics to rival machines like the PS1 or even PS2.

Superman

I can see my house from here!

ATV is one such game. The first thing you should notice is the detail on the riders, the ATVs and the world they inhabit. The animation is smooth and steady and gives a fair sense of placement to your rider on the tracks. This is not an easy task to carry out on something like the iPhone, where a lot of its games look like a Fuzzy Felt board on acid, but ATV has obviously had a lot of work put into it to give it a good ‘feel’ of weight and depth. Graphics aside, how does it play? Very well, we’re happy to report. It’s controlled with the accelerometer which means no fiddly on-screen ‘buttons’; it’s just a case of tilting the device in the direction you want to turn which is perfect for a racer. At this point we should like to thank the developers for giving us the ability to adjust the sensitivity of the controls, a very handy feature indeed and if left out, could have spelled death for this game.

Handstand

Ok, who put glue on my handlebars?

The tracks are worthy of mention here too. When you first start playing it, it feels a bit like a runaway train on the Himalayas. Stick with it though and you’ll find these tracks are fairly technical in their layout. Before you know it, you’ll be timing your jumps to cut out those unnecessary extra bumps and you’ll be flying (literally) ahead of the pack into first place. Don’t get too smart though, as the difficulty curve here can take you by surprise and when you get onto the SX tracks you will be punished for any arrogance you may have previously displayed! Seriously, the difficulty of these tracks ramps up (pun intended) considerably.

High Flyer

Look mum! NO HANDS!

There are quite a few modes to keep you interested; Arcade mode, Career and Multiplayer. Arcade will let you test your tilt-skills at FMX, MX and SX, and in SX you can do practice run or time trial to hone your skills before going head first into a proper race. FMX lets you show off your stunt skills, and MX is more for working out the technicalities of the tracks. Career is a mix of all kinds of track with the difficulty being turned up as-per-progress and Multiplayer is, well, self explanatory. Only one of us here at CG Towers is rich enough to afford an iPhone (the rest of us live in discarded home appliance boxes) so we can’t comment on how well the multiplayer mode works, unfortunately.

One of our gripes about this game, is the loading times. If it’s pick-up-and-play you’re after, look elsewhere. The loading times aren’t huge, but if you’re waiting on a bus or in a queue, we advise you to leave this game alone until you can give it your full attention.

 

4/5

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Written by R.Furie

Ross has been playing games since he can remember and has had games machines around him all his life. He's what we now refer to as "Old Skool" because he grew up playing games with a hand carved wooden joystick on a TV forged from rope and stone. Nourished on a diet of Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Joust, Gauntlet, Bomber Jack and other various wholesome arcades he has grown to become a versatile and open minded gamer. Favouring the style of open-world games he's sure VR can't be far away, and looks forward to attaching himself to a colostomy bag and slipping into a deep VR coma so he need never have to deal with real life again.

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