Reviewing The First Game I Had On My Phone Three Years Later

Three years ago, on August 27th 2014, I got my first smartphone: A white LG Optimus L7. It was my 12th birthday, and I was really happy to finally swap the old Nokia for one of these modern Smartphones which everyone else in my class already had.
But because I had no experience with the new tech back then, my Dad downloaded my first game for me. I wanted a racing game, and he wanted something that doesn’t require too many permissions. In the end, he went for Fast Racing, which was my only mobile game for about three months, and one I kept coming back to even years later.

Now, after three years, I have downloaded it again. Not onto my LG though, as it died only 1.5 years after I got it, on the day we came back from our Florida vacation. I now have a much bigger and much more powerful Sony Xperia Z Ultra. In three years I have collected a lot of experience when it comes to Smartphone games, and I will compare it to other current racing games like Real Racing 3 and Asphalt 8. This may seem a bit unfair considering how long it is on the market, but it’s actually a great test of how well it held up for such a long time without receiving mayor updates.

Booting it up, we’re greeted by the loading screen which I used as a thumbnail for this post. The game boots very quickly, I measured 6 seconds - really good for being such an old game. An ad windows pops up, but we can close it immediately. I’m not really a fan of the background music, and neither of the fact that I can’t play the game in Fullscreen mode. My Sony Xperia Z Ultra has on-screen home buttons, and whilst almost every other game hides them, Fast Racing doesn’t. This problem of course didn’t occur on my LG which still had physical home buttons.

Taking a look at the menu, we’ve got “Career” and “Quick Race” mode which we will talk about later, as well as a “more games”-button with 20 sponsored games you may want to download. In the “Shop”-menu we can buy and upgrade our cars and power-ups, as well as purchase in-game coins for reasonable amounts of money. In the “Options”-menu we can adjust sound, music, sensitivity and performance, as well as choosing our desired steering layout. This is also where we can find a tutorial.

Starting with the career mode which is separated into beginner, standard, expert and master, we have several types of races to participate in: normal races against AI cars, time trials, elimination runs and survival races. You always need to win a medal to unlock the next race.
As soon as you selected your desired race, you can choose your car. This is also something that separates this game from other racing games: Normally, you get to decide between three or more cars which you can afford, and have to buy one of them. Not so in Fast Racing, where you already got your first car: A Nissan R35 GT-R. The cars don’t come with logos or names, but you can easily see what car they’re supposed to be. The cars which can be unlocked are: Ferrari F430, Ferrari 599 and F12 mashup, Porsche 911, Lamborghini Aventador, the supercar concept from the thumbnail which I don’t know the name of, BMW i8 and a Bugatti Veyron. Check the gallery at the end of this post for screenshots of all the cars.
The cars can also be customized, and yet again it differs from other racing games: Changing the color, adding stickers and tinting the windows doesn’t cost any money. Sadly, you only have five colors and five stickers to choose from.

Apart from customizing the cars, we can also upgrade them. Unlike other racing games, the upgrade menu is very simple and tells you exactly what the upgrade will do to your car - for example making the car go 10 km/h faster. The five different upgrade categories are top speed, acceleration, nitro, handling, and tire. Whilst the word “handling” is spelled correctly in the spec sheet on the left, it lacks the “l” in the upgrade menu.
Before starting the race, we can choose if we want any power-ups, for example starting the race in 1st position or increasing the top speed by 5%. Maximum number of power-ups is three, however they cost quite a bit of the in-game money. There’s also an option to bet on your race result.

So, after finally starting the race (which means having to listen to an awful three-two-one jingle), let’s talk about graphics. They do the job, but they’re no way near as good as in Asphalt 8 or Real Racing 3. The nitrous adds exhaust flames and two blue lines following the car. Collisions are also not the best: There’s no visual or technical damage to your car, and instead flames show up between you and whatever thing you crashed into.
The racetracks come with guide arrows in the corners, and with money and nitrous power-ups placed along the way. The track layouts are not particularly creative or realistic.
You can choose between three different camera angles, sadly though no interior one. You also get information about your current speed (but only in km/h), your lap time, your position and which lap you’re in. A small map shows the part of the track you’re currently on, as well as you’re opponents.

Apart from the career mode, you can also play quick races. For these you can also select between Normal, Time Trial, Elimination and Survival mode. Sadly, most of the tracks need to be unlocked in career mode first.

All in all, I would give the game a three to four-star rating, as it’s fun to play and runs smoothly, but only has medium graphics and physics. However, as it requires very few rights and almost no storage space (it’s less than 17 MB!), my final rating is 4.5 stars.
Sadly, the game rarely receives any updates. The current version 1.6 was released February 14th 2017, with a rather funny changelog: “Removed multiplayer mode due to extremely low usage. Thanks.”
The Play Store-description of the game is mostly correct, although I would disagree on the “cutting edge 3D graphics and gnarly impact-crash sound effects”-point. According to the Play Store, the game has been downloaded 100 Million times. The average rating is 4.2 out of five stars.

Here’s a gallery with some more in-game screenshots:

So, I hope you liked this kind of post. I’m probably not going to review any other games, as I just wanted to review this one because I had a strong personal connection to it.

I can only recommend you trying out this game - comment your opinion down below!
Tobi aka The Stig’s German Cousin