Jet Car Stunts

Game Info

Successful mobile games making the leap to consoles is becoming a pretty big trend right now.  The latest such game to make the leap is Jet Car Stunts, a racing/platformer hybrid that takes place miles up in the sky.  Your goal is to take your car/jet combo vehicle and make it to the end of the track as fast as possible.  There’s no other cars that appear on track with you, except for ghost cars to set the pace, so there’s nothing to interact with besides the obstacles on the track and the ground that you’ll inevitably fall to.

There are three modes in the game: Time Trials, Platforming, and Star Collecting.  In time trials, you have to complete five laps within the designated medal times.  It’s very hard to tell where the lap gate is on these courses because it’s all generic, indistinguishable gates.  These can be fun for the first few laps, but with no one to race against besides the ghost (which usually speeds off on you anyway), they drag on for longer then they should.  Some of the times seem a little ridiculous too.  Platforming mode has you trying to find a way to the end of the course before you crash and burn 10 times.  These can get tricky as you have to use your car’s jet engines to make it through floating rings to ramps high above you.  These can be pretty tricky to navigate because the car controls are absolutely terrible in the air.  The tutorial says you can open up some flaps to better steer and turn while you’re flying, but I didn’t find that to be the case at all.  All I seemed to do was half-assed barrel rolls while banking too sharply.  And while I’m sure Peppy Hare is thrilled about this, it makes trying to maneuver through a curved line of rings extremely frustrating.  Add the fact that you can run out of fuel between checkpoints and can only die 10 times before you have to start over, and I became more frustrated then I should, even on the easy levels.  The final mode has you traveling around various tracks collecting stars.  A lot of these are on top of tall pillars that you have to fly off ramps to.  Unfortunately, your car gets in the way most of the time, so you can’t see where the star is as you’re flying towards it, which makes judging your landing quite hard.  Not that the controls work well enough to make big adjustments in the air anyway.  It’s mostly an exercise in trial and error until you hit the one sweet spot of location and thrust to finally land and collect.  There are even stars that don’t have an obvious way to collect them.  I saw one on top of a bridge that went over the track, and the only ramp near it doesn’t lift you up high enough to get to it, even with full jet boost.  And this is one of the first few levels of this mode.  The design of these levels is quite poor.

If the racing is boring and the controls are bad, there should at least be something pretty to look at and listen to right?  Alas, that is not the case here.  Besides the generic sky background, the only other thing to look at are different sized and colored 3D shapes.  And while this may be fun in geometry class, it’s not so fun in a driving game.  The lines of these shapes aren’t even the smoothest in the world.  There are supposed to be all new cars to use, but they all behave exactly the same.  The only difference I could find in them is the shape and color.  And don’t expect to be jamming to any sweet tunes while you’re driving, because the levels have absolutely no music at all.  Like none.  The menus have some generic distorted guitars playing in the background, but once you’re in the actual levels, all you get are sound effects from your car.  Add that to the list of unpolished things in this game.  Another weird one is the level select screen for the star collector levels skips letters in their stage names.  It goes from something like “Easy B” to “Easy D.”  I thought maybe these corresponded to levels with the same name in other sections, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

THE RECOMMENDATION

I didn’t really like anything about this game, except for the drift controls that actually felt pretty good.  The driving can be fun on occasion, but the whole thing just has an unfinished feel to it, from the sparse graphics, lack of music in levels, and weird level name skipping.  I can only recommend this for hardcore fans of the original mobile games.