StreetBike: Full Blast Review

StreetBike: Full Blast, published by Chillingo, is a racing game that takes place on 2 wheels; 4 wheel vehicles are so over exposed in racing games! 3 wheel vehicles are not really represented in games at all. The goal is the same as pretty much every other racing game on earth: try to get to the finish line before every other racer, or to beat the clock. There are also races where collecting a certain number of money icons is required to succeed.

The game requires a large degree of practice in order to master its handling. Bikes are not cars, and the sooner this is realized, the better the proceedings will go. The game has dozens of races, and thankfully starts off with a fair difficulty curve in the early races before things get tricky in the later races.

The game has a surprising lack of polish, especially for a Chillingo-published game. There's a lot of pop-in, where scenery elements will suddenly start appear out of nowhere. The menus have a cheap feel to them where they just don't feel all that intuitive to activate. Also, the turbo requires the finger to be taken off the accelerator when using. The tilt-based wheelie controls are not easy or intuitive to use at all either. Most importantly, even the name of the developer is misspelled on their title card as Turtles Entertainments. This may just be a poor localization job - Turtles Entertainment is based in Korea, but isn't this the point of having a publisher like Chillingo, to fix these issues, and make the game feel as smooth as it ought to be?

StreetBike: Full Blast really has a lot of issues to fix, particularly to make it feel like a more polished product. Until then, this is just an unspectacular racing game, even if it is one of the few motorcycle racers on the App Store.