Auto Crisis, a stylish new top-down battle racing game from Baraboom, is now available in the app store. Though Auto Crisis is a visual treat backed with a fun, funky soundtrack, controls are what make-or-break a racing game and this one feels very, very broken.

Auto Crisis offers two racing modes: Challenge mode (denoted by the trophy icon) and Time Attack mode (denoted by the stopwatch). The menu system takes a very minimalist approach, offering little in the way of useable information. In Challenge mode, you run a three-lap race around a single map against 3 other cars in an effort to eliminate them one-by-one. Each car has three points. The winner of each race gains a point (up to the maximum of three) and the last place car loses a point. Once all of a car’s points are gone, it is eliminated from competition. When a car gets eliminated, another vehicle takes its place until only one vehicle remains.

There are three types of cars available: a compact car, a pick-up truck, and a sports car. Each is faster than the one preceding it. Your own vehicle will be upgraded once you eliminate a vehicle of a higher class. Your first vehicle is pretty slow, so you’ll need to drive well and make use of the various weapons scattered throughout the track. Once activated, the gun power-up autofires until its ammo is spent. It takes several shots to take out an opponent with this weapon. The homing missiles are a bit more effective. With another vehicle in your sights, the missile will lock on and hit its target. It appears to take a couple of shots to temporarily take an opponent out of the running. The nuke is more effective, though a decidedly short-range option. It only takes a single blast to blow up opponents who are nearby. If they are a few car lengths away, it won’t harm them, nor will either blast harm you when you let ‘er rip. Any car affected by a weapon requires a recovery period of a couple seconds, which could be the difference between winning and losing. Beware the frowny face: this one affects your driving ability for a few moments. Picking up multiple weapons doesn’t help either, as only the current one is useable.

Time Attack mode allows you to choose your vehicle and race by yourself to see how quickly you can finish the race. You race against ghosts of other vehicles from online players around the world. Your best time is ranked on a global leaderboard.

The graphics are beautiful and were what initially attracted us to the game. Car colors can be customized via a color palette slider and the environment shows great shading effects and offers a very polished presentation. The upper right corner indicates your position among the other cars, and the upper left corner shows your current weapon and remaining ammo. The game’s soundtrack is also a plus, with some funky/cheesy music that reminds us of the backing track to an HR training video, though it feels at home in this game. The controls are where everything suddenly goes south. You use a single finger to control your car. Hold your finger on-screen to make the car go. Drag left or right to initiate turns. If you hit a tree or something, swipe downward to put it into reverse, then hold on screen to drive in reverse. Swipe back up for drive and resume holding to move forward again. To fire a weapon, you must double-tap your finger (yes, the same finger that you are using to drive). Unfortunately, it just feels very wrong in practice.

The first thing you’ll notice is how confusing it is to try to negotiate the road by dragging your finger around the screen. We had a major tendency to oversteer during our first few races, weaving one way and another across the road. We got lapped by every car. Once you get the hang of driving, you get the sense that your car should be moving faster, though it won’t. It’s like our grandmother got behind the wheel and decided to do battle with these other cars. And battle isn’t really the best word because it feels like there is very little battle being done, as our opponents were often not visible due to being ahead of us by a couple of seconds or somewhere behind us once we were able to manage the controls a bit better.

Double-tapping to fire is awful. More often than not, it was unresponsive and resulted in our vehicle stopping as we removed our finger. Winning a race is boring, with no fanfare or anything. There isn’t even text indicating that you won; the screen just fades to the four cars and you see a dot added to one and removed from another. There also doesn’t appear to be any way to pause/restart the game, which is annoying. Reversing your vehicle is painfully slow and is one of the times where the awkward controls feel useless.

Auto Crisis Pros:

• A visual treat with beautiful graphics
• Polished presentation
• Funky beats soundtrack

Auto Crisis Cons:

• Control mechanism feels very wrong in practice
• Slow speed -- like grandmother got behind the wheel
• Opponents never seemed to be around
• No fanfare for winning
• No pause or restart ability
• Only one map

Replay value is suffering at the moment. With only one map, very few cars/weapons, and a wacky control scheme, we don’t see ourselves coming back to this one too often. Auto Crisis is in serious need of an update. Tilt steering, a virtual pad, dedicated buttons… anything would be better. Keep the current scheme as an option if you like, but give us another way to control the cars. We’d also like to see weapons become cumulative so that picking up multiple weapons keeps them all at your disposal until used. For $0.99, it still feels unfinished and lacking in many ways. Given the time of year and our generous nature, we’re willing to the Baraboom the benefit of the doubt that this will receive major attention in the way of significant updates, offering Auto Crisis a provisional 3-Dimple score. Until those updates occur, though, think twice about how you spent that buck during the holiday sales.

Auto Crisis gets our AppSmile 3-Dimple rating: