Detonation Racing

This racer is fun, fast and frenetic, but it's not a perfect experience. Detonation Racing is a gratifying driving game with a lot of attention to detail and a smart mechanic that fuses racing with destruction. There's a lot of gameplay here, between all the episodes, challenges, drivers, and events to partake in. Even if you choose not to play online, there's quite a bit of meat, plus you're encouraged to collect stars to unlock goodies in your garage, customize what your car looks like or upgrade how it performs, select different vehicles (each with different strengths and weaknesses) and attempt to climb up the ranks against fictitious racers. Your Strike Bar shows how close you are to unleashing some carnage on the track, while your Boom Bar shows how near you are to getting your hands on a prize.

But at the risk if nitpicking, this fun racer falls short in a couple of areas -- mostly when it comes to visuals and performance. The game looks good on an iPhone or iPad, but not that great on a larger screen, such as a Mac or television connected to an Apple TV. Explosions tend to look blocky, and there's some long load times, objects that suddenly appear out of nowhere, and significant slowdown when there's a lot of action happening on the screen. Also, this game lacks haptic feedback, which would have been great for an explosive racer like this, and no option for local split-screen gaming on a Mac or TV. But again, Electric Square has some super talented developers and they're squeezing a lot of detail and depth -- and accessibility -- into a (mostly) mobile game. It's impressive on one level, and a ton of gameplay here, too, but hopefully they'll add some missing features and boost performance issues in a future update. As it stands now, it's a good but not extraordinary arcade racing game for those bent on destruction.