BlazeDev Releases 3D Star Racer

http://www.clickgamer.com/moreinfo.htm?pid=3843§ion=PPC

Do you like three-dimensional games? Do you like installer apps that speak English (and not French)? Do you like apps that don’t spend loading about a minute (!) off even heavily optimized and defragmented cards? Are you looking for an Anthelion II (a decent arcade shooter game from PDAMill) killer? Then, avoid 3D Star Racer. This game is everything that a game of this genre should NOT be. I wasn’t particularly happy (I just found it plain uninteresting) with the now-free (!) Solterra by Blacksmith Studios (see review here) but this commercial game is worse in almost every respect. My biggest complaints:

1. the installer is in French
2. the game installation is in no way easy-for-the-novice (you need to manually copy the large EXE file to the handheld and, then, execute it there). The manual doesn’t even explain creating a shortcut to the executable file of the game.
3. really large loading times
4. very (and I really mean that!) bad animation (rockets, meteors are really-really lame – they have no animation, no rotation, nothing; explosions are very ugly too)
5. pretty slow on my freshly hard reset Dell Axim x51v (a bit faster on my Pocket Loox 720 but in no way jerkiness-free)
6. on the Pocket Loox, the game had a black screen after a restart; only sprites were to be seen.
7. the game gets boring really soon (if you can stand the bad animation, the really lame sprites, the lack of speed on certain machines etc. at all), as with all pre-rendered games
8. it costs $18.95

Verdict I don’t think it is even worth giving the demo of this title a try. There’re far better titles of the shooter/racer genre for far less money. SkyForce, Anthelion (II), Darklaga, Arcade Park - they're all FAR better action/arcade games. UPDATE (03/23/2007): Allen Gall's review