Having recently watched the Blu-ray with my kids, I thought it would be fun to download the game and give it a bash too. Designed and developed by PIKPOK to accompany the movie, the team have built a fun and enjoyable title that can be played by everyone. The racing is fast and the game has a bit of life in it to unlock customizations for your character. Adding a few different race types also, is a great addition, I think. Going round and round in circles could get pretty boring, pretty fast.
Without even having seen the movie, you’ll be introduced to Turbo and the Mexican dude who races Snails, Tito. Tito gives you advice at the start and guides you through the menu screens and shows you how to play the game. The general gist is.. Collect tomatoes to unlock a variety of add-ons to make your little snail go faster, look cooler and be successful with the ladies (not really.) You progress in the game by spending your collected tomatoes and winning races on your way to being the champion. A tried and tested racing game formula that I’m sure everyone is familiar with already. The racing gets fast very quick and I did notice frame rate issues on my Nexus7 (2012.) Playing on the Nexus5 felt smoother, but jerkyness is still there. You race to the end using boosts and rails to gain an advantage to win. Power sliding round corners gives you even more speed, you might find the little dude hard to control. Luckly, customizations can add higher ratings on different attributes.
Spending your hard earned tomatoes lets you tune-up your character. His main skills are split into,
- Speed
- Acceleration
- Steering
- Boost
You can also update different parts
- Shell
- Spoiler
- Exhaust
Loads of different ways to spend your currency and fairly soon these tomatoes will run out. This leads me to you know where. IAPs!
Yes, IAPs are present here. You’ll notice that the top tier to buy with real money is £90. I’m not sure who in their right mind would pay that kind of money for a mobile game, but you’ll be able to pay to win, if that’s your thing. Me? I’ve been playing Turbo for a week and a half and haven’t spent a penny. I’ve progressed well and had nearly 20 races without the need to spend real money. I’m pretty sure I’ll be reaching a point soon, where, I won’t be getting any further and I’ll have to pay. (I won’t actually pay anything, I’ll just delete and move on) Without getting into another rant, I don’t like this business model, I think it stinks. I’d have paid a few pounds to download and I would be more than happy to review it and tell our readers to do the same. I’d still recommend playing Turbo for what it is, but be warned, the IAPs will rear their ugly faces at a certain stage.
Download Turbo Racing League, below.
We also captured some gameplay footage and a chance to familiarise yourself with the layout, menus and get the general feel for the game. We had to use audio from YouTube, so please excuse us for that. Enjoy!