Grabbed out of a bundle on Bundle Stars, I had this one sitting around waiting until I was in the mood to play it. When I was ready, I clicked 'PLAY' in Steam and was awarded with some logos and ... a blank black screen. Nothing responded. A second attempt and it started but would crash out.

At this point I was fed up and didn't want to deal with it. I left it for a while and returned. Turns out having it in windowed mode crashes the game. In fullscreen mode it is much more stable, but would often crash when exiting.

Once I got in, I had to deal with rather awful controls. In that the KBM instructions does not quite match up with the actual controls. If you a KBM user, ignore CTRL and focus on WASD+SPACE,NUMPAD.

Once I learnt how it all works, well, it is a rather decent vehicle item collector game. But it was not fun getting to this point.

You start off with the most basic car, course, and game type. There's little instruction on what to do aside from collect coins. Stage one is 'Island', but it starts off in a somewhat massive cave and it took some time jumping around inside it until I got outside to the island.

The aim is to drive around and find fragments of bronze and silver coins, and a hidden hard-to-reach gold coin. Get all three and you win. You can actually continue on the map at this point, which is nice, but you quit by exiting the game. This and the issues I had above really hurt this title. Which is a shame, because by the second map I was having fun with it.

Most coin pieces are rather easy to find, and have a pulsing circular particle effect around them that can be seen as far as the map draw distance allows. Getting to them is the fun part, requiring navigation of tight paths, ramps, and loops. With the gold coin often requiring the player to launch themselves off an incline and trying to land on small platforms.

It is not as frustrating as it could be and becomes much easier when you grab the per abilities unlocks scattered around the map.

Tricks are a decent proportion of the game. Lauching the vehicle you have selected off a ramp or building you can use the numpad to twist and flip the vehicle. Holding SHIFT and 4 or 6 will perform a spin. Aside from looking rather neat, you can use them to knock the vehicle around and up to various areas normally blocked. In many of these you see an on-screen message of WELL DONE!

While good the first few times, these popups do get in the way when you want to skip and speed around the map taking up the centre view of the screen. If you know the map well, you can just speed off, but otherwise you find yourslef waiting for them to clean before you can continue.

Abilities are usually somewhat passive, you just need to drive through them to acquire and they take effect right afterwards. Nitro boost is the only one to have its own key ('N' by default), and is most useful when combined with the others. Power Jump and Anti-Gravity allow you to reach higher platforms and take greater jumps off ramps if you hit the timing right, and when combined with nitro can be used to scale some walls to flip your vehicle backwards and get to places you normally could not.

Drift, I'm not sure if I ever used. See all my previous rants on how fucking STUPID I find drifting to be. Mega-Health has some pros and cons, as there is an acievement system built around blowing up your car, the extra health and regen can just get in the way. Mirror flips your direction without having to turn, it come sin handy on high narrow ledges.

The interesting one is Teleport. This is not an ability but unlocks the teleporter in several places on the map. Driving through one brings your car to a stop and positions you elsewhere on the map. Normally really high up where the battery collectables are located.

Teleporting appears to have a RNG to it as well, and you can't gaurentee you'll end up at the other end you want. By the time you've gotten it though, combined with all the other abilities you'll get back to the entrance in seconds.
There is a mind annoying issue on the penultimate stage forgetting to stop momentum, or clipping you into a wall causing an instant explosion. There's no penalty of this as you reset elsewhere on the map shortly after.

Batteries don't give you any extra power but are simple collectable items. There's an entire unlockable game mode built up around them where the aim is to grab all of them as fast as possible. Either the game is bugged or nobody is playing it as I was constantly in the top 10 of Global leaderboards to this.

Green Batteries are easy to find, and are normally on the main driving paths. Yellow require a bit of jumping and tricks to gather. Red are in the hardest to reach areas, and will likely require you to unlock all abilities to grab.

They're all in the same place each map, which means you can figure out most-optimal paths to finishing off the Battery-Collector game mode.

Other game modes involve getting to a high speed and a time attack course. TO be honest by the time I would of gotten around to them I had unlocked everything the game had to offer and was just grinding down a final achievement. They're the same maps you've played just with different objectives. It does being in some variety to the game, but you'd have to really be into this genre to bother by this point.

It is a bit of an odd one. At first I hated this game, it didn't work, the music was generic and annoying, and a lot of the textures looked muddy. But I ended up playing it for around 8 hours and did have fun with it.
Leaderboards appear to be empty, so you should have zero issue knocking me off of them :) and the achievements are easy to grab, if only a little grindy.

There's enough unlockable cars with a really good variety and the maps all have their own themes. It uses elements of what I liked from RC Mini Racers and Super Toy Cars but has a few to many issues of its own. If you can get past them, there's a fun single player game here, and is something I would of liked to see continued to be worked on.

Game Acquisition: Purchased on sale (BundleStars)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Thread: 1 2 - 23 June 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows 7
Processor: i5
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: Discreet Shader Model 3 Card
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Storage: 400 MB available space