To be honest, when I opened this game on an Android emulator for the first time, I didn't have high expectations. After all, the current mobile game market is either heavy on card drawing and stacking up values, or "fake racing" with full light pollution effects. But after running the first mountain map, I actually found this game to be a bit interesting, and I even vaguely smelled a bit of the "operation limit determines the outcome" of the early KPL.
Let's talk about the core feel first. The racing cars in the game are not the kind of straight-line kings with mindless acceleration. Instead, they have extremely high requirements for throttle control and curve routing. Rugged terrain is not a decoration. Going uphill or downhill will affect the speed of the vehicle. When flying over a small slope, the body posture will change the landing point. If you do not adjust the direction before landing, and directly hit a gasoline barrel or container, the rhythm will be interrupted instantly. This "punishment mechanism brought by physical feedback" is precisely the most basic gaming point of competitive games-every time you press a button, you are responsible for the next corner, rather than simply fighting for reaction speed.
Some people may think that the operating dimension of this kind of racing game from a God's perspective is too single? I think that precisely because the perspective is fixed and all information is exposed, the differences between the players are more clearly reflected in the route planning. In the same stretch of continuous S-turns and obstacle areas, top players will predict the gaps in the boxes in advance and use the road shoulders to make small bounces to cut into the inner lane; while ordinary players often wait until they see the obstacles before manually turning the direction. This time and again, the gap in a single lap can be reduced to nearly two seconds. This level of "track understanding" is very similar to the ability to handle soldier lines in MOBA. It is the kind of thing that viewers who understand it will find it very profound.
Let's talk about the version environment. At present, the penalty for car crashes in the game is not heavy, but the terrain makes you more tolerant. In the container-dense stages, the benefits of radical welting are high, but if it is slightly bumped, the car body will have an obvious setback, and the acceleration loss will be more serious than imagined. Therefore, in actual combat, the more stable "preservation flow" style of play can actually achieve stable rankings. This reminds me of the current operating idea of "brushing until it is formed and then fighting in a group" in the wild core version. But the good news is that the developers seem to be intentionally making balance adjustments - at least in my impression, after the latest update, the turning radius of heavy cars has been slightly weakened, and the ability of light cars to get stuck in medium and high speed corners has been reflected. This slow and steady way of adjusting parameters at least shows that manufacturers are not just going to lie down after finishing the work.
The charging model is zero in-app purchases and relies purely on technology, which is indeed a breath of fresh air in the current environment. For players who want to practice track planning, there is no interference from paid props, and the variables of each game focus on personal operations and on-the-spot decision-making. If you like to go to the training ground, you can just like reviewing the game video and repeatedly pondering the extreme route of a certain continuous obstacle.
Of course, the audience for this game is still very small, and the level of players in online matches is uneven. In many cases, finishing first does not mean how strong you are. It may just be that your opponent overturned on the second big slope. But on the other hand, because there is no mature big data matching mechanism, the top few IDs you see on the rankings are often polished up through hard work. This primitive ecology is a bit like the early years when various teams would arrange training matches to learn from each other.
If you are tired of those pseudo-racing games that "start with auto-cruise and perform a big move every three minutes" and want to get back the feeling of controlling the car with your hands and memorizing pictures with your brain, I suggest you dig out this game on your old phone and give it a try. Don't be dissuaded by its simple style - across the tree-lined mountain road and the dirt road covered with oil drums, you can see a very clear upward spiral of competition: first learn to brake, then learn to route, and finally learn to predict where your opponent will squeeze in from. For someone like me who likes to study the game from the underlying mechanism, this is probably the most primitive joy. 🏁