Race the Sun Review

Developer: Flippfly
Price: $4.99
Version Reviewed: 1.01
App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2

Graphics / Sound Rating:
User Interface Rating:
Gameplay Rating:
Re-use / Replay Value Rating:

Overall Rating:

Race the Sun is a sort of endless... thing... where you have to outrun the sun. Or more specifically, you have to outrun the sun setting. Your little ship thing is solar-powered, you see, and it’ll shut down if it goes too long without sunlight. Crashing stops it too, naturally. Anyway, it’s a pretty cool game that can be a bit too frustrating at the start.

As with any auto-runner (or flier, or driver, or whatever) the goal is to get as far as you can before you inevitably fail. Also as with many auto-whatevers, Race the Sun sets a series of goals (crash into X number of things, travel a total of Y distance, etc) that you can complete both for a sense of progression and to unlock new stuff. This new stuff really makes a difference, as the bare-bones beginning isn’t particularly impressive. You mainly just tap the left and right sides of the screen to steer left and right while trying not to crash into anything.

Once you start unlocking ship abilities and power-ups it gets a lot more interesting. Suddenly the initial frustration feels like it was leading up to something, and you’ll find yourself earning more points to earn more stuff to earn more points a bit more regularly. As an added bonus, by the time you reach this point you’ll have gotten a bit more used to the game’s reflex demands and should be able to get even farther in each run. It’s still pretty tough, though.

I honestly wasn’t having much fun with Race the Sun at first, but I’m glad I stuck with it. Things really open up once you start to unlock features that, honestly, should’ve probably been enabled from the start. Still, once you get going it’s difficult to stop.