AiRace Speed Review

[Zera]

Greetings, folks. This is a review of AiRace Speed, a futuristic racer for the 3DS eshop that released on September 19, 2013.

The gameplay of AiRace Speed can be summed up as follows: Imagine piloting the Arwing from Star Fox, except it's going at F-Zero speeds through winding tunnels filled with instant-kill obstacles. It's as much a fast, intense death race as it sounds like.

The controls are simple - you can steer in any direction, bank left and right to improve your turning, brake, and use the nitro. Nitro acts as a boost that rapidly accelerates you to your highest speed, and it's infinite - the catch is that the faster you go, the harder it is to avoid the insta-death obstacles. So will you take it easy and settle for a bronze-star time to unlock the next level, or will you go full throttle and push the limits of your speed and skill to the max?

There are 18 levels. Most contain three laps of increasing speed (your min and max speed actually go up after each lap), time requirements for bronze, silver, and gold stars, and three optional objectives -

A. Win without crashing.

B. Win without releasing the nitro or crashing.

C. Win without touching any walls.

There are also 42 achievements, which mostly necessitate completing these challenges, but include a few others as well.

Two of the levels are infinite and randomly generated. After every 20 obstacles, you'll pass a checkpoint that increases your speed. Brakes are disabled to prevent cheesing your way through, but you can still use nitro if you're feeling dangerous. After several levels you can even exceed the speed of sound while using nitro. You only get three lives for these levels though.

The presentation is quite nice, if a bit repetitive (one you've seen one sci-fi tunnel, you've seen them all). The frame rate is sadly not 60 fps, but 30 fps minimum, which is still good because a frame rate drop would adversely impact the gameplay. The speed can get very fast...very fast - and the highest challenges are as hard as you might imagine. One excellent touch is that all the obstacles are uniquely highlighted in yellow, which makes them easy to identify quickly.

There are also online leaderboards, but because of the simple gameplay and how hard it already is, I didn't actually care about achieving a high rank.

There is no multiplayer of any kind. No online, no local, not even computers to race. The tunnels aren't large enough to accommodate many players, and I commend the developer for their razor-sharp focus, but for a game with "Race" in the title, the irony is palpable. This is a single, solo, solitary experience about YOU. How fast will YOU go? Can YOU earn all the achievements? Those are the questions, and caring about the answers is necessary to enjoy this game.

One thing that really soured the experience for me at the end was these two achievements...

Crash Maniac: Crash 1000 times overall.

Super Captain: Fly more than 10 hours overall.

After completing the game, I had 6 hours of playtime and 340 crashes. If I already experienced everything the game has to offer, where am I supposed to get this extra 4 hours and 660 crashes from? The game does not have enough content to justify these achievements (for a skilled player, at least), and instead creates grinding in a racing game. (NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!)

Other than that, this is a great game. It's one of the fastest and most challenging games on 3DS. It's cheap and has a demo, so racing fans should check it out.

8/10 (Great!)

Edited May 13, 2016 by Zera

[Ken Masters]

That's very informative, man! props!

I was considering getting it because someone on the chat was hyping it up, but you bring a good point here. It looks like a tech demo to me.

Keep it up! :3

[Ema Skye]

This looks awesome!

How much is it, and is it like the other AiRace games on the 3DS?

[Zera]

I believe it was $7 at launch, but about a year ago its price was cut to $3.50. It also got an update with a few bonus levels where you fly through rings (not like Superman 64)