In-Fusio's IF Racing Head 2 Head is a Formula One-style driving game in which you compete with other racers on a closed circuit. You can choose to race against CPU opponents, with the goal of winning the championship cup, or take on a human opponent through downloadable shadow racing, similar to the same feature in titles such as the N-Gage's Pandemonium. This feature is only momentarily diverting and doesn't mitigate the game's dated graphics and gameplay. In short, IF Racing Head 2 Head is not a significant improvement over its 2002 predecessor, Ferrari Racing. Aside from some unfortunate frame rate issues, there's nothing here to render IF Racing 2 unplayable, but there's nothing to make it especially memorable, either.
IF Racing 2's driving mechanics are pretty much standard fare. You can accelerate, decelerate, and turn, albeit not with a great deal of granularity on your digital keypad. You'll compete against a fair number of other racers, all of which will putt along at a speed that looks something like 10 miles per hour. You can increase this speed, somewhat, by upgrading your engine, which will cost you some of your winnings. Doing so may make you a bit zippier than your competitors, but this seems like splitting hairs, given IF Racing's tiresome pace. It's probably possible to experience a greater vicarious sense of speed while racing ants.
Should you happen to veer off the center of the track and into the shoulder of the road, your vehicle will immediately start taking damage. If you don't quickly return to driving on asphalt, your car will violently and spectacularly explode. You'll get the same result if you even think about driving on grass. No, this isn't a warning about driving under the influence. If you drift off the track even the slightest bit, your car will start rapidly spinning out (at a much faster frame rate, in fact, than the game is otherwise able to manage), and you'll soon have to be pulled from your flaming wreck of a vehicle.
All of this nonaction plays out in complete silence to accompany an uninteresting, largely static background, loosely based on the region in which you happen to be competing. Falling prey to the viridian death that flanks each track is actually the most rewarding activity in IF Racing, as your vehicle's crash animation is the only smooth one in the game, and some perfunctory conciliatory MIDI plays after you fail to finish.
The boring gameplay found in IF Racing's single-player campaign is, unsurprisingly, also boring in the game's quasi-multiplayer mode. In the main menu, you can pick a pseudonym to be used online. Opponents can download ghost images of your vehicle and race against recordings of your best laps. Of course, you can do the same. You can even challenge the best user-submitted ghosts in hopes that your name will appear on In-Fusio's online leaderboard. While shadow racing may be all that's possible with modern GPRS speeds, it lacks the immediacy of true head-to-head action. Furthermore, racing against a ghost removes all other cars from IF Racing's otherwise well-populated tracks, making cruising around homogenous circuits even more tedious.
Aside from these cursory multiplayer features, IF Racing Head 2 Head is not a major upgrade over the two-year-old ExEn (a modular API used in the Sharp GDX7 phone line) game on which it's based. To paraphrase John Hughes' seminal comedy, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, mobile gaming moves pretty fast...if you don't stop and look around once and a while, you might miss it. Apparently, In-Fusio hasn't been privy to developments made over the last two years of wireless gaming.
