AR Mighty Angry Stunt Cars or M.A.S.C AR for short is an ARKit game where you get to control a car, collect coin and get it to a designated exit area.
By default, you start playing with a pickup truck, but you can unlock more type of cars by watching ads or collecting all the coins and finish the levels.The game can be played either indoor or an outdoor environment. When you start the game, the game will ask you which size of game you want to play. You have three options: Small (indoor), Medium (indoor/outdoor) and Large (outdoor). After you choose a game size, you can position the level anywhere you want on a surface. If you didn’t get it right, you have the option to reset the position all over, so no worries if you didn’t nail the position just right.
Gameplay
The objective of the game is to drive the car to an exit location. This location is marked by a glowing circle on the level. There are also coins spread around the map. The higher the number of coins you collect, the higher your 3-star rating will be at the end of the round.
Regarding the game controls. You have three main controls: the gas pedal (move forward), the reverse pedal (move backward) and the steering wheel.
I’ve been playing this game for a few hours and I really found these type of controls unintuitive to use in augmented reality. If I can find a good side, is that it does make the game much more challenging. It takes quite some time to get used to playing with them. Even then, it just fills awkward, and it overthrew the flow of the game.
OK, so what gameplay mechanics I think would have worked better? The one that the ARKit game powARdup use. What makes powARdup such an amazing game is that you see and feel that the controls were designed from the ground up for AR. It feels smooth, works well with the movement of the device and it just feels very fluid and very satisfying to play.
I did spend more time playing this game because I really wanted to understand maybe I am missing something. After like one hour into the game, I stumbled across a funny moment. Watch it in this video and I will continue to explain about it afterward.
So you see what happens here. The game used some sort of an optical illusion. If you watch the track from a certain angle, it looks like a road is complete. This is not a stages gameplay, this happened for real. In fact, the road wasn’t complete at all, and there was a gap that didn’t allow me to pass through. I thought that it’s going to be a very easy round and I just drove straight to the point. Suddenly the car vanished and I was “WHAT?!”—only a few seconds later to discover that this was an optical illusion.
Now, if the game was a fast-paced game, I probably would have moved all over the place with my iPad and would have seen it. However, because the game plays at a slow pace, I stood static at a single angle and therefore couldn’t see the gap.
Not all the levels are like that. I’m still not sure whether this was done intentionally or not or maybe I just caught this by accident. I think that the levels were designed with optical illusion in mind because of the texture used for the overlapping parts and because it appeared more than once. There was one time that I spend like 10 minutes trying to jump over a ramp to the other side, only to discover that the endpoint was right there on the floor and I only need to drive the car flat to it 🙂
Nevertheless, it was a really enjoyable moment. Even if it was designed like that, still, once you figure this out it’s no longer a challenge. You just move around, see the path and move the car.
So is that was the goal of the developer? I’m not sure. I first thought this game is trolling me. Stil it’s certainly nice to see how much fun is to play with optical illusions in AR. If you love these kinds of stuff, I recommend trying out the puzzle games AMON and ARise, both are amazing puzzle games based on optical illusions.
Game Difficulty
I had some really hard time at some levels because of the gameplay mechanics. You need good hand-eye coordination and even if you do have, it still can be quite complicated. I find it out to match the controls when the car suddenly turned to the other direction. I was steering left where I should have steered the car right.
Sometimes you need to make sharp turns in a very tight path and it’s like doing parking with your car, it takes moving back and forward until you able to make a turn.
I like difficult games, but because the way it is designed, it felt very slow, forced, unsatisfying and not rewarding, even after I got to the endpoint.
I love slow augmented reality game when they are involved in observation and problem-solving. Maybe if the controls were more intuitive in AR I would have enjoyed it more. I do wonder if for a game like this a spatial mechanics steering would have worked better? I am defiantly not in favor of device-rotation type. Maybe the need for such a high precision steering wouldn’t have worked well because of the very tight gameplay in some parts of the game.
I think that with a more complex environment, this game would play more like a puzzle game. The thing is that the levels aren’t that complex, and you can just quickly move around the environment to see its structure. In AR puzzle games built around optical illusion, you have to move around the 3D space in order to align the puzzle right. The alignment of the items differ base on your position in the X, Y and Z axes, and this can pose some real challenge. This game is not like that, maybe it tries to be like that at some points. The thing is that the developer calls the game a “Stunt racing in augmented reality”, but I didn’t see any stuns nor I felt in a race.
Bottom line, the game is difficult at times and it takes some time to get used to the controls. if you love challenging games, you probably going to enjoy this one.
Conclusion
AR Mighty Angry Stunt Cars felt more like a remote-controlled car game. Like the developer tried to mimic the experience of a remote control car with the physical controller. In that aspect, it nailed it right. Whether this type of controls works well for AR, in my opinion, no. Having said that, you might like having those remote control car like controls and having the option to maneuver the card on top of obstacles.
The last time I used a radio-controlled car was quite a long time ago, but I enjoyed driving it at a fast speed in a wide outdoor open environment. Nothing stops you from driving the car fast but it will be much harder, sometimes almost impossible, to finish the objective like that.
Overall, in my opinion, awkward gameplay mechanics in AR followed by mediocre gameplay experience.
The game is free on the AppStore, just keep in mind that this is an ARKit iOS game, which means it works only on ARKit compatible devices running iOS 11.0 or later.