Car Mania, one of many new time management games (or “route management” games, as we’ve seen them recently referred to) to hit the app store, has been released by Origin8 for our amusement/torment. Prepare to enjoy all of the angry honking and gratuitous cursing of a traffic mess right on your iPhone or iPod Touch!
Car Mania offers three game modes: Survival, Road Rage, and Time Attack. Only Survival is unlocked from the start. There are also three maps utilized in the game: New York, Freeway, and Central. As with the game modes, only New York is unlocked initially. Once you accumulate a certain number of happy drivers, the locked areas will become accessible.
In Survival, your task is to route the yellow vehicles to the yellow destination and the blue vehicles to the blue destination. Sounds easy. Not so. Vehicles enter the New York map from any of four different locations. To route each vehicle, simply draw a line with your finger from any vehicle, along the desired roadway, all the way to the target location. It couldn’t be much easier. Tap on a vehicle to stop it; tap again to start it on its way. There is a Rage Meter that tracks how angry your drivers get. Anything from crashing into another vehicle to waiting too long to being directed to the wrong location can increase the Rage Meter. Once the Rage Meter is full, the game is over. An occasional road work sign will pop up to cause trouble and attempt to enrage the drivers. Tap a few times on the sign to make it disappear and get your traffic moving again. The vehicles move a little slow for my taste, but there is a fast-forward button that will speed up gameplay. This is especially helpful early on when there are few cars. Once the board starts filling up, we recommend using the regular speed for the sake of your sanity.
Road Rage mode takes Survival and turns it on its head. The goal in Road Rage is to crash vehicles and enrage your drivers in an effort to fill the Rage Meter quickly. Filling the Rage Meter or hitting the 3 minute mark will end the level. Time Attack gives you 4 minutes to direct as many vehicles as possible to their proper destination. There is plenty of variety to keep any gamer interested. As with these games, there is a strong desire to try “just one more time” to beat your personal best or that of your friends through OpenFeint. The three maps offer very different experiences. New York puts you within a city, requiring the use of side roads and the management of intersections. Freeway has only two entrance points, with each branching off into three color-coded lanes. You won’t have to deal with intersections, but if you let vehicles of the wrong color to miss their off-ramp, you’re stuck. The Central map offers one of the coolest features of all: a train that will periodically barrel through the map, smashing any cars that are in its way. Tons of fun!
Graphics are pretty standard for this type of game: color plays an important factor and everything looks very clean. There is a decent soundtrack and nice honking and smashing sound effects. You also have the option to listen to your own music library while you play. Controls are all touch-based. At times, it is easy to select the wrong car or accidentally drag your line too far into another lane. You can correct this by redrawing the line, but sometimes it’s just too late, so be careful. We found that when two cars approached an intersection from different directions, there was a bit of unpredictability, as some cars would stop and let others go through, while others would barrel into each other, resulting in a fiery crash. It wasn’t clear which would happen, so it was hard to handle: do you always tap-stop one car to avoid crashes, or take your chances and let things happen as they may?
While similar to many other games in the app store (Harbor Master, Flight Control, Taxi Drive, etc.), Car Mania offers some unique features that make it worth adding to your collection. Boasting a fun gaming experience and a $0.99 price tag, this 4-Dimple timewaster hits the mark.
Car Mania gets our AppSmile 4-Dimple rating:
