Recently, I was diving in the music sharing area and found many guys loading BGM on carts. I suddenly wanted to talk about the "City Speed 2" I was playing. To be honest, as a veteran player who has played Java racing since the Symbian era, I am really filled with emotions when I see the current mobile racing games.
Not to brag or be slanderous, this work is quite solid. Operations such as light-touch drifting and nitrogen injection feel very smooth, and the track design also inherits the refreshing feeling of the previous game. But what I want to talk about more is that it represents an industry trend-the free in-app purchase + light social model, which has become a standard feature of mobile racing games. Do you still remember the "Asphalt" series back then? Buyouts were the norm back then, but they are almost extinct now. The developer Shenzhen Yunbu Interactive Entertainment chose to take the zero-yuan payment route and rely on skins and vehicle payment points to sustain itself. This was something that would have been unimaginable ten years ago.
I personally feel that this trend is not entirely a bad thing. The threshold has been lowered, and more players can experience the speed of racing; but on the other hand, the depth of the game is indeed shrinking. I used to play the Symbian version of "Need for Speed: Most Wanted", and the physics engine and modification system were so complicated that I could write a paper. Nowadays, mobile games focus more on "coolness" rather than "realism". If you look at the drifting mechanism of City Speed 2, it is obviously a simplified version optimized for the mobile terminal, but it is easier to use.
Judging from industry news, many small and medium-sized manufacturers are now making this kind of "low threshold and high feedback" racing games. The Yunbu Interactive Entertainment team is very smart. They seize the fragmented time of the players. Each game lasts for two or three minutes, and they can take it out and run two laps at any time. It's much more comfortable than sitting in front of the computer for an hour while holding back my ultimate move.
Finally, let's go back to the music sharing area. The BGM in the game is actually quite exciting, with heavy rock music paired with the roar of the engine, which makes running a few laps late at night quite relaxing. It is recommended to wear headphones when playing, and the experience will be improved to a higher level. In a word: This is a qualified product of the times, suitable for nostalgia and early adopters. Old players can find the shadow of the past in it, and new players can also enjoy the pure pleasure of the track. 😌