Review: GT Racing - Motor Academy

A Lamborghini without its engines and wheels.

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5.2

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Before Grand Turismo, the only respectable way to experience a Lamborghini was to head to the showroom and test drive one of the sleek machines. Or if you were lucky enough, you could borrow one from your rich neighbor. Sony changed all of that with its creation of the now famed Grand Turismo series, faithfully replicating the real world experience of driving a Lamborghini in the virtual world. The simulation racing genre surfaced and gamers across the world rejoiced. There was now an affordable way to drive one’s dream car, from a Ferrari to a BMW to a rare vintage vehicle. After a few years, a new sim racer in the form of Forza Motorsports jumped onto the bandwagon and since then, both series have shaped a laundry list of basic features that should be in any sim racer: highly detailed models of licensed cars from major automotive manufactures with authentic accompanying engine sounds for each of them, many well-designed tracks, the ability to tweak vehicles with various upgrades, a huge career mode to keep players invested in their vehicles and the game, tight controls and great graphics to complete the realism.

Firemint attempted to do for iPhone what Sony did for the PlayStation platform with Grand Turismo and what Microsoft did for the Xbox platform with Forza Motorsport with Real Racing last year. One isn’t always enough and Gameloft has come onboard to provide iPhone gamers with another sim racing option in GT Racing: Motor Academy. With the excellent Real Racing as a prime example of how a sim racer on iPhone should be like and the laundry list of basic features provided by Grand Turismo and Forza Motorsports, it’s hardly comprehensible that GT Racing could be bad. Unfortunately, though, GT Racing: Motor Academy IS bad. It’s a racer which seems more like a Lamborghini without its engines and wheels.

That’s not really obvious from the get-go. GT Racing boots up with a fantastic CG sequence which sets the game up and from there, I got to navigate through beautifully constructed menus. There’s a stunning amount of work put into packaging the game. When you get to the menu for the first time, you’re going to be impressed with the amount of depth displayed in the options. Any enthusiastic player booting up GT Racing for the first time would immediately swerve to the vehicle selection screen to check out the car line-up, one of the most fundamental, important, yet exciting aspects of any sim racer. GT Racing delivers on its promise with over a 100 vehicles from 24 major automotive manufacturers, including Toyota, Nissan, Audi, Ford and RUF. The track selection screen turned out to be a pleasant surprise as well, with a robust cabinet of 14 tracks, some from real-world locations, including my favorite Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. Get into the game, however, and the mess starts piling up.

It’s highly recommendable that you jump right into arcade mode first to get a feel for the controls. To be fair, crafting a sim racer on the iPhone can be a really tricky affair since there aren’t any physical sticks for precision steering, so I wasn’t expecting everything to be perfect – just highly functional. There are fewer control schemes here than in last year’s Real Racing but that wouldn’t matter one bit if the controls are fine. I dutifully tested out each control scheme and it’s a pity that none seems to offer the level of accuracy that Real Racing engineered.

One of the main flaws I found with the controls is that they really aren’t that flexible. For instance, in Real Racing, using the auto-accelerate and manual steering via left or right screen tap control scheme, I could tap anywhere along the left or right side of the screen and still manage to steer my vehicle successfully. Additionally, tapping anywhere else on the screen would brake my vehicle. Using the same control scheme in GT Racing, the screen keys on the left and right are fixed so if you tap anywhere else on the left and right side of the screen, the game wouldn’t register a steer. Furthermore, the brake key is at the bottom of the screen, meaning braking requires some extra, rather unnecessary effort. To put it simply, the controls in GT Racing are counter-intuitive.

The default control is the accelerometer-based scheme and while it was relatively tight, I was never confident of using it to navigate a sharp turn after quickly braking. The steering wheel option is overly touchy, proving to be a nightmare to use. Between the auto-accelerate and manual accelerate options, I would prefer the former as the later really strains your concentration and it just seems that there’s too much work to do for simply driving a vehicle. Then again, while choosing the auto-accelerate option permits you to concentrate more on steering your vehicle precisely, it defeats the purpose of a sim racer. This problem, however, is inherited from the iPhone platform itself so it’s in no way GT Racing’s fault. Where it does break is in its rather unresponsive controls. On many occasions, my vehicle was unintentionally rammed into a barrier when the game failed to respond to my inputs. It’s very frustrating to drop positions or lose a game when it’s entirely no fault of yours.

While driving, you could do well to admire the highly detailed environments. It’s one of the few accomplished aspects of GT Racing so cherish it for all your money’s worth. Weather effects like rain and snow not only add different environmental conditions to the tracks, but also serve as eye candy. Unfortunately, the vehicles are a poor match for the environments. There’s a great level of inconsistency displayed here and it shows when some vehicles are pampered with more details than others. The jagged edges around the vehicles really hurt the game because it seems like someone ordered cardboard vehicle cut-outs from a DS game and placed them against backdrops produced by the stronger iPhone platform – the whole picture just looks ugly. With the image already looking half-baked, perhaps it would be better to tone down the details displayed in the environments because the framerate suffers heavily from all the output. The game sports a choppy framerate throughout and the action would freeze for a moment or two frequently. This could have been manageable had it not affected the gameplay but for every freeze, your vehicle reorientates itself and automatically brakes, causing the technical shortcomings to be more major than needed.

Despite the counter-intuitive controls and technical shortcomings, there’s still some fun to be had from taking your dream car for a few laps around one of the many brilliant tracks after you get used to the serviceable controls and jerky framerate. But it’s the career mode where you will spend the next few hours in. GT Racing nails the career mode down just fine, with 4 categories of events you can partake in, each further broken down into events for the 4 classes of vehicles available. Along the way, you would uncover the 2 locked tracks and unlock more advanced vehicles for use in arcade mode. In addition, you would win cash to purchase more vehicles for your garage. You could also upgrade your vehicles, but the upgrading tool in GT Racing is so terribly designed that you wouldn’t even bother tweaking your cars. GT Racing gets the ‘Purchase upgrade’ part right, but not so much with the ‘Tweak vehicle’ part. When you purchase an upgrade, you simply buy it with your cash and that’s it – there’s hardly any indication of which vehicle the upgrade is getting into. In fact, there’s no effort made in asking you which vehicle in your garage you want to upgrade. When you take a step back and analyze, it all seems like the upgrading tool was added much too hastily and there was little time to ensure that it was even implemented properly into the game.

More problems turned up when I attempted to select the right vehicle for a particular event. The statistics only show the weight, the power and the top speed of each vehicle. I tried looking for additional, significant details like acceleration and handling and I couldn’t find them. To be honest, I have never played a sim racer where the acceleration and handling statistics of each vehicle aren’t viewable. There’re some weird design choices here and it’s clear that GT Racing’s lacking the kind of polish that you would expect to see from such a fully-featured sim racer.

The lack of polish rears it ugly head again when you put on a pair of earphones while playing the game. Amazingly, each vehicle has the SAME engine sound. It’s one awful engine sound copied and pasted over 100 vehicles. Now, I wouldn’t mind if the nondescript Toyota Prius has the sound of a powerful Ferrari, but I mind when both the Toyota Prius and Ferrari California have the same meat grinder spinning sound clip, which gets replicated across the board. It all adds up to a very disgusting aural experience.

The unrealistic physics on dirt and snow track conditions round up the list of problems in GT Racing. While the action on normal track conditions feels just right, your car really starts to feel like a bar of soap on dirt and snow. Watch helplessly as your car slips haphazardly across the tracks in ridiculous fashion on dirt and snow track conditions. Really? In a sim racer?

GT Racing’s saving grace comes in the form of some pretty nifty features. The game allows you to post replays of your races directly to YouTube and you can rotate the models of cars around and take screenshots of them on the vehicle selection screen to save them on your iPhone. In addition, the game features online multiplayer for up to 6 players. It’s here that the YouTube functionality becomes a boon.

Final comments
Sim racing fans looking for the perfect game to get their fix of portable sim racing action are better off with Grand Turismo Portable for the PSP or Firemint’s Real Racing for you iPhone gamers. There’s a stunning line-up of over a 100 licensed cars to race on 14 unique tracks here in GT Racing: Motor Academy, a feat that is unparalleled in depth on the App Store now – but what you’re essentially getting with this game is a Lamborghini without its engines and wheels. The controls, while serviceable, are counter-intuitive and lack the level of accuracy engineered by last year’s Real Racing. Sometimes unresponsive, the controls also represent a major flaw in the game. The backdrops are really beautiful, but aren’t matched by the jagged edges on every vehicle. The framerate is consistently choppy as well. The lack of polish continues to plague the terribly designed upgrading tool and uninformative statistics for each vehicle. The sound is ugly and the physics are way off on dirt and snow track conditions. A long career mode and some nifty features won’t save this game. Skip GT Racing.