by Despite its flashy neon lights and comic book-style interstitials, Flashout 2 is a pretty straightforward sci-fi-tinged racer: you’ll zoom around a futuristic track, earn cash, upgrade your podracer, and repeat. Here’s the catch: each hovercraft comes armed with a machine gun, rockets, and mines, and a quick trigger finger is often the difference between first and last.
As is often the case with touch-based racing games, controls are a sticking point for Flashout 2. Thankfully, developer Jujubee offers several different options, each of which has a sensitivity slider, but turns still prove frustrating—when tilting, you’ll have to make an elaborate gesture to make it around a tight curve, while you’ll have to extend your thumb halfway across the screen with the virtual pad to do the same. The virtual button configurations suffer for placing the brakes too close to the weapons and controls, but they’re still the most precise option of the bunch.
Once you get the hang of things, though, Flashout 2 becomes a competent, if insubstantial anti-gravity racer. The dozen-odd tracks are sufficiently curvy and dotted with power-ups, ammunition, boosts, money icons, and alternate routes. Unfortunately, all of the locales look and play alike, and while the hovercraft are certainly fast, they feel weightless and airy; you don’t hug corners as much as you careen though long straightaways. This actually makes for decent combat—you’ll weave in and out, trying to avoid enemy targeting while vying for position—but racing purists will find Flashout 2 flighty.
Despite the presence of in-app purchases, Flashout 2 handles its money deftly. Before each race, you can purchase a complement of shields, speed boosts, and weapons. Buy too little and your better-equipped opponents will fill you with bullets; buy too much and your hard-earned cash goes to waste since you can’t keep weapons from race to race. By setting the economy up like this, Flashout 2 encourages thriftiness and utilizing each track’s generous ammo and money caches to stay stocked. From there, you can save for big-ticket improvements or buy a new hovercraft outright.
The bottom line. Flashout 2 is fast and slick, but its combat and upgrade systems stand out more than its racing elements. There are more substantial sci-fi racers on the App Store, but Flashout 2 is a fun, lightweight diversion.
Review Synopsis
Product:
