Split/Second iPhone Review

Where else can you wreck your rival's hot rod by crashing a jet on top of it than Split/Second? It's that kind of Michael Bay-esque madness that got gamers first interested and Disney hopes some of that curiosity leads those same would-be fans over to the App Store. But while Split/Second on the iPhone shares a good deal of DNA with the exciting console racer – track locations, cars, etc. – there are a handful of technical and intelligence issues that hold it back from racing with big boys like Need for Speed Shift and Real Racing.

Split/Second is a high-speed racer that sends you screaming across courses expertly designed for destruction. You are a contestant on a reality show, capable of detonating parts of the track to screw your rivals in moves called Power Plays. You bank the energy needed to unleash power Plays through drifting, drafting, getting air, and more. When you have enough energy (shown on the projected meter behind your car), you tap an on-screen button to activate whatever trap is dead ahead. The more energy you have stored, the bigger the bang. With three bars of energy, you can even radically alter the course, creating new paths and sending opponents flying into the air if you time the lift or drop just right.

Of course, your rivals can do the same thing. And they do. In fact, they do it exceedingly well. In some respects, Split/Second reminds me a little of Mario Kart. You're running a near-perfect race. You've held first place for every lap. You're almost to the home stretch. And then magically every racer behind you hammers you with shells and lightning, sending you tumbling back to fifth just as you reach the finish line. Split/Second pulls this crap, too. On more than one occasion, I've made it to first place after learning a track and avoiding all of the little sticking points (more on this in a moment), only to have the racers behind me unleash hell on the final lap. Surprise, first to sixth in a matter of moments without enough track to recover.

While the draw-in distance for Split/Second isn't bad, it's just not good enough for the kind of, uh, split-second reactions required in races. When tracks blow up or collapse, you often need to make immediate evasive moves. Considering how pixel sensitive Split/Second is with crashing – if a single dot of your bumper clips a post, your car either wrecks or comes to a dead stop – it is entirely too easy to drop from first to sixth. Sure, Disney could have slowed Split/Second down to accommodate for this, but speed is required to keep the action manic. There needs to be some sort of middle ground. Or better hardware. Considering how much faster the iPad is than the iPhone (and the larger screen provides a higher-res display), I would love to see Disney bring this over to a machine that can show you enough detail in the exploding track in time to properly react.

However, there could be another reason that explains some of Split/Second's roughness: it's simply not finished. On the menu screens, the numbers 0.9.4 appear in the lower left corner. This isn't even version 1.0. Could it be that to get Split/Second on the App Store in time for the console version launch at retail, Disney released the almost-finished version? It's not that Split/Second isn't functional because of this. It still plays. But it answers the critical question of why it feels "off."

Verdict

It’s too bad because all of the pieces to make Split/Second a triple-A racer are in here. Wholly playable online multiplayer over Wi-Fi. Excellent track design with lots of stuff that goes boom. An all-new location exclusive to the iPhone version. And it’s pretty smooth, too, considering how fast it is. (I played it on a 3GS, by the way.) But it just never gels. Explosive, arcade racing in the vein of Burnout is exactly the kind of racing game the iPhone needs right now. Split/Second should have been able to provide that. Hopefully, Disney's racer will be refined in the near future (come on, gamers should be buying version 1.0) and get an iPad port.