It’s time to get away from boring games, recklessly.

You know what’s fun? Wrecking stuff, ask any 2 year old with a toy hammer. Reckless Getaway is not a racing game as it may first seem, no more than Angry Birds is a tool for bird watching. What Reckless Getaway is, is a simple and fun arcade style rampage of destruction.

The getaway part of this recklessness is in the story, you’ve committed a robbery and need to escape from the police. That’s just about all the story you’re going to get or want from Reckless Getaway, all the content you really need is the excellent gameplay.

A pair of simple arrows and a power-up button means you’re going to have no issues with any controls here, most driving games have at least a break button but as I said before, this isn’t most driving games. Your driving takes place across seventeen separate stages, split across several different environments but they’re all technically very much the same, while the arrangements of the maps might be different there’s almost nothing separating the first level of the game with the last, there’s no new power ups and no new upgrades or stunts. You’d think that this would make for a repetitive experience, but instead the core gameplay is so much fun that I really found myself coming back to repeat levels.

Upon completing each level you’re given stars out of four depending on how high you’ve scored and a certain level of stars is needed to progress to the next level. Score is earned by doing almost anything in the game such as: collecting coins, ramming, jumping cars and driving into oncoming traffic. Not everything increases your score, leaving the screen takes off a small portion of your score and wrecking your car, by depleting your health, locks out a star each time you wreck. The driving itself is utter madness, you can swing the car from side to side to smash into as many cars as possible, but you’ll need to be wary of where the coins are as collecting them is one of the quickest ways to boost score, but because of the speed of the game you’ll rarely have time to swerve to collect them, meaning that replaying levels until you learn the layouts is practically required.

Reckless racing scraps just about every gameplay idea that’s come up in the last decade, such as evolving complexity between levels. There’s even another mode that dispenses with the coins entirely and just gives you a beefy vehicle to make mass destruction even easier and more enjoyable. The gameplay might be simple but there aren’t many games out there that look this good and are this much fun to play.

[rating:5]

Game: Reckless Getaway

Developer: polarbit

Cost: $2.99

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