Burning Tires crashes at Pocketgamer with just 60%

[Patrick]

Away with by-the-book racing games: Here comes "Burning Tires 3D" - no matter if you wanna race around tracks in the ice or burn your tires (pun intended) on hot lava - neither your car nor your driving skills get a break in this game. We weren't given a break as well, as PocketGamer has given our whacky racer just a 6/10 score and told people to "make an effort to avoid being seduced by Burning Tires 3D's beauty" - ouch!

You'll find that as you press left or right on your handset's directional pad, your car turns far too sharply to begin with, and not sharply enough later on. The turning isn't graded, leading to your car steering at a constant rate. So if you find yourself drifting to the side of the track on one of the few straights in the game and you steer in the opposite direction, you'll rapidly be heading into the scenery on the other side of the track. If you could view your racing line from above, it would be a series of zig-zags from one side of the track to the other.

This poor control spoils what fun Burning Tires 3D has to offer. There are other faults we don't like (chief among them that even if you complete a flawless lap, the three computer racers are right on your tail to overtake you) but none as irksome as the problem with the handling.

All that really hurts and so do the subratings of our game:

• Audio/Visual: 8/10
• Gameplay: 4/10
• Value: 5/10
• Innovation: 3/10

That a game can look so good and still be so bad (at least when it comes to their rating) needs some explanation - here's Mike Abolins' try at that:

A pretty 3D racing game that unfortunately plays as bad as it looks good.

Though it didn't look so bad to begin with. Burning Tires 3D is a pure arcade racer so you can "kiss goodbye to realism". The ugly looking and hard to maneuver car from the beginning becomes a thing of the past rather quickly, so this ain't really a bad point. But the controls themselves really need to get used to and you will never really feel at home with them. And thanks to our track design, most players would "cover more distance laterally across the race track" than they will "straight along it".

Well the sun doesn't always shine on our heads (as a matter of fact, at this time of the year it often does) and aside from their not-understanding of "rubberbanding" the review was rather fair - as always you can see it for yourselves after the link:
http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/Mobil...iew.asp?c=2422