Take off, fly through hoops and land safely…or crash with Sky Racer.
Sky Racer is a flight simulator for the iPhone. The game includes most of the typical features you would expect from a flight simulation game such as obstacle courses, fun stunts and free-flying (my favorite) but you will not find any combat scenarios here.
Sky Racer includes 12 levels to fly through and five different planes ranging from military planes to small passenger planes. You also have options of modifying the environment such as the time of day, mist, clouds and wind.
The game uses tilt controls to navigate your plane through the various obstacles or when just simply flying around the environment. I found the controls to be fairly simple to use and the iPhone accelerometer can be modified within the app settings, so you can find a good balance.
Before and during a flight, Sky Racer includes background music and various sound effects from the plane engine to the sound of an explosion when you crash. Unfortunately, both the music and engine sound effects are looped and rather ruin the flight experience.
The overall environments are nice and fairly detailed but they seemed very basic to me for a flight simulation game. I cannot say whether this is a limitation of the iPhone or of the app, but when I see the visual graphics available on similar games, I lean toward a limitation of the app.
The area of performance was something I noticed right away with Sky Racer. On an iPhone 3G, the game suffers. Game play is jagged and very laggy and makes for a not so good game experience. To that end, I recommend this game for iPhone 3GS users only.
When played on the iPhone 3GS, the game fared much better by shedding the jagged game play and lag, however the game was still somewhat glitchy (not smooth) when transitioning between levels.
You can see a game play video here.
Overall, Sky Racer is a fun game to play that offers a decent amount of obstacles and free-flying freedom. However the replayability is cut short because of the somewhat sub-par visuals and performance factors depending on which iPhone device the player is using. The game definitely has potential and will become a great game play experience when the visual graphics and performance are improved.
Sky Racer is scored a 2.5 out of 5.
Sky Racer is available on the iTunes App Store for $0.99.
