Previewed at the start of the year, and released yesterday as a free download (for a limited time only), Ovi Maps Racing is a top down, Super Sprint-style racing game with a difference. That difference is in the courses and circuits you race... you create them yourself using the Ovi Maps service, with knowledge of the roads in the local area where you are standing in at that point in time.
Once the game has a location, you are presented with a map view of just the streets. Select any one of the crossings or junctions (highlighted with orange dots) to be your starting point, and you'll get some on screen arrows. Touch the next road to take, and continue to do this until you either create a looped track and are back at the start line (typical racing circuit) or you have reached the location where you want to end (so more like a stage of a rally course).
You'll have to cross your fingers that where you are when you decide to create a circuit is somewhere interesting, because you get only a small area around where your phone thinks it is – by my reckoning its about a one mile radius. Unfortunately, there is no option to choose a location, so building up a track where I used to cycle as an eight year old is not going to be possible until I go and visit my Mum. Neither can I rebuild the Monaco circuit, which is one of the tracks that features on most driving games nowadays and allows a direct comparison to be made.
This is partially compensated for by the availability of 15 cities that can always be chosen, no matter where you are – and it is also in these cities that a number of pre-built default tracks are available. These defaults are actually a good idea for two reasons; the first is that you have something to look at to see some tips and tricks for making your own tracks, and also they provide tracks that everyone has access to. More on that in a moment.
What's a touch disappointing is the tracks themselves when you actually start playing. For all the mapping data that Nokia could put in here, from satellite imagery to give it a bit more realism, you've got a lot of grey. There are dark grey roads, with light grey arrows, some grey fields with the occasional tree (where my house is), and when it's really sure you are in a city (such as London), you'll get some buildings rising from the ground. They've got some white in them, so that breaks up the colour palette, but you can't have everything. From a developer's point of view there's only so much you can do, and keeping the tracks a little bit more abstract is probably required to keep bandwidth down and processing time to an acceptable level.
So you've created a track, and you're ready to share them. Where's the share button? Keep looking because it's not there. One of the key concepts of the game, the user-generated tracks, doesn't have a built in system to send them to your friends. You are encouraged by the in-game help to find the track file (it's in C:/MapsRacing/Tracks) and then somehow get this to your friends. Maps Racing suggests that you should use Ovi mail, and leaves the rest of the steps as an exercise to the user.
Words fail me... apart from “fail”... and possibly “epic”.
Controlling your car is a bit hit and miss - actually there are going to be a lot more hits because of the choice made by Red Lynx. Only being available to S60 5th Edition devices, and relying solely on the touch screen to play the game (even if, in the case of N97 and N97 mini owners you have a keyboard and d-pad/arrow keys you could use) means that you only have the touch screen to steer with. The controls have been boiled right down to left and right. The left side of the screen turns the car to the left (more accurately, spins it counter-clockwise) and the right side turns to the right.
Where's the accelerate control? Oh that's automatic and is virtually being held down all the time, That's... nice. How about brake or reverse? Not present at all? Wow. So getting round a hairpin is mightily tricky, and if you are used to finessing your driving style, this isn't the game to do it in. And you might be in a bit of a pickle if you get caught in a dead or a tight alleyway as your car has no reverse gear.
Those notes aside, you can be very precise with the steering, at least on the capacitive screen of the X6, while you will need a little bit more of a positive touch on the N97 and 5800 (which actually helps a little bit). You will find yourself inducing a lot of oversteer and power-slides, and the faster cars are even more vulnerable to this, but a few laps and you'll work out the handling... it's not a complicated model to understand.
And on a quick note about the car modelling – a track around the local streets of Edinburgh here that clocked in at around one and a quarter miles took 80 seconds to complete, which works out at close to 60 miles an hour for an average speed. Which is a touch high, even for a sports car, given the road conditions, but it does show that circuits created and driven are at least in the realm of possibility.
I have one major problem with Ovi Maps Racing, and while it might not be seen as a critical problem to many, it's enough to make me think that this is a wasted opportunity. As a game, Maps Racing is a bit boring.
Let me explain. This is a great little time filler for the odd moments, but I do worry that after two weeks or so, you're not going to jump in and pick this up to fill in those odd moments when you want to challenge yourself and spend some good gaming time with your phone.
The greatest strength of Maps Racing is also the biggest weakness. With an arguably infinite number of racetracks for you to race around, the ability to have a consistent challenge is not there. Note that I say consistent, rather than fixed. As you play any game, you will get better at it – this is only natural. A good designer will ensure that the game grows with you, providing you with a challenge every step of the way, but also giving you a sense of achievement.
Maps Racing takes the easy way out by relying on the old “beat your high score, then beat someone else's score” methodology. Each circuit has its own Fastest Laptime table, with a local version and, for the bundled tracks, an online version that has the quickest time that week. Your target, at each track, is to be the fastest. Simple as that. But yet too simple and with an obvious flaw – unless your track is widely distributed, you're going to be playing against yourself. Using the bundled tracks means you have a lot more players to challenge, but that misses the point of playing where you happen to be at the time.
But the secondary goal of Maps Racing is to mix social gaming and sharing the tracks with your friends, alongside using it as a technology demonstrator of what the Ovi Maps api can do for programmers. On these points, Maps Racing achieves what it sets out to do, and does it with a certain amount of style and panache. As a game, it's very frothy with little substance; great for short moments and will have its fans, but as something I would want to always have with me, that's when it falls short.
Nokia made a smart move releasing this for free. The natural expectation is then changed slightly. If Ovi Maps Racing was being charged at £5 per copy, I would be very wary in recommending it to people. As this review goes up, it's a free download from the Ovi Store – who knows how long that will be the case... It's certainly an application that you should have at least one look at, and it will gather a vocal fan-base and promote the use of Nokia's software and services approach with the Ovi Maps integration.
So Maps Racing should be heralded as a success in spite of its limitations. As a tech demo it's a high score in the 80s, but as a game... 67 seems about right.
-- Ewan Spence, Feb 2010.