Racing Fever GT Hands-On Preview

When Digital Chocolate acquired Finnish mobile developer Sumea last year, it added a handful of excellent game franchises to its list, like the Racing Fever series. These simple, stylish racing games brought Rad Racer-style arcade driving to mobile phones. Although these games weren't in 3D and they lacked licensed vehicles, they were still a lot of fun. Racing Fever GT, the newest entry in the lineup, continues in the same tradition--only with an updated technological edge and objective-oriented gameplay.

Racing Fever GT welcomes you to an island nation whose carefree residents seem to spend all their time plotting amusing vehicular mayhem. In the game's story mode, you ping-pong between three major types of events. There's the crash derby, where you try to run as many microbuses off the road as you can; the car jump, where you gather boost power-ups and blast into the ether off of wooden ramps; and the two-wheeling events, where special wedges in the middle of the road boost you onto one side of your car, and you try to hold the position as long as possible.

In all three types of events, you have to try to match a certain number of points before you reach the end of the track. Successfully barging into a bus will garner you a certain number of points, depending on your speed at the time of the collision. The same goes for jumps, which award you points based on airtime, and two-wheeling, where your score depends on the duration of the trick. As you play through the game, these score objectives will start to be mixed and matched, so that you might need to earn 800 jump points and 400 crash points to beat a level. The tracks are finite in length, and there are only so many jumps, wedges, and buses per race, so you'll have to start committing layouts and patterns to memory a relatively short way into the game. The more points you earn, the higher your "reputation" will be and the more bikini-clad admirers you'll garner--an appealing way to measure your progress, for sure.

Racing Fever GT's graphics aren't in true 3D, because the game has been engineered to run well on the greatest possible variety of handsets. However, the sprite-based graphics are fairly convincing nonetheless, due to a bunch of nifty visual tricks from the development side. For instance, subtle shading is applied dynamically to the sides of the road to heighten the effect of motion, and the game also makes good use of speed lines. In all, it's one of the better-looking 2D racing games we've seen. Only a single MIDI tune loops over the racing action in the Nokia 6620 version. It's a good thing that it rocks.

Racing Fever GT is looking like it'll be a good option for more casual racing fans who may well have more fun running hippies off the road than precision shifting. We'll have the full review ready for the game's mid-October release, so stay tuned to the gamespace for more details.