Mobile content has evolved considerably in the last few years, taking off into new directions and paths as fast as the evolution of the mobile phones themselves creates both the new paths and the new content possibilities. Technology has made it possible for calls to give way to voice mail and text messaging, for nearby calls to become international calls, and for monotones that approximated song melodies with beeps to become real tones that were actual, true clips from the songs themselves. Mobile content has recently undergone another phase of expansion with the mobile app, a small program run by a smartphone platform to accomplish various purposes, from organizing a day planner to fighting a fictional but deadly civil war between races of shape-shifting robots on an alien planet.
As is obvious, among the latter, more exciting sort of mobile applications are video games. Whether ports of existing console classics or whole-cloth new creations from any of a multitude of talented and imaginative video game app creators, video game apps have taken platforms like the iPhone by storm and sell well through the integrated digital content storefront. One of the games that fall between the aforementioned port-or-new game categories is Phaze, a newly-crafted $4.99 futuristic racing game app that plays like a badass copy of the old Wipeout hover-racing series, right down to the way Wipeout replaced cartoony elements and toy weapons with unprecedented speed and sleekness and a unique physics system for the non-race car hover-bullet crafts.
Phaze’s game mechanics are as simple as its apparent progenitors. It’s a racing game where the driver uses hovercrafts instead of cars, powers up with a variety of sleek weapons, and races across three laps to get to the finish line and get the first, second or third slots. Special markers on the track either give your craft a speed boost or endow you with a weapon – from bombs, to rockets, to missiles – to use against your opponents. Nitro speed boosts can also be picked up and stored, as can defensive shield power-ups that increase your craft’s durability for a limited time. The graphics and sound are top-notch for a high-speed racing app, giving the game a lot of atmosphere and immersing the player very well in the game’s world. Even the physics of the game is surprisingly sophisticated, as bad driving and striking impact [whether against weapons or walls] really slow down the craft noticeably.
The accelerometer allows for craft steering by turning your phone in the direction you want to go in, and speed adjustment by turning your phone up or down to accelerate or decelerate. This is a little dizzying at first but proves to be very exciting as you keep playing, and Phaze handles very smoothly [especially for such a fast game], rendering fears of clunky accelerometer controls moot. Interestingly, the game boasts 10 unlockable crafts, each of which handles differently and features a unique combination of atrributes [speed/power, defense/shield, and handling/agility], each unlockable by beating the game on various levels of Championship mode difficulty. This increases the replay value of the game considerably, although it could have been even higher with a simple “mirror mode” allowing you to drive through mirror images of the 16 available tracks. On the whole, though, the game has minor issues and things that could have been done better, but these don’t hold the game back from being a very entertaining ride for $4.99.
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