This review originally appeared within iLounge’s iOS Gems series within the compilation article, iPhone Gems: Twitch Action Games, Crazy, Cool, or Kusoge. Additional details may be found in the original article.
“Located in Denver, Factory Design Labs, Audi’s interactive agency of record, designed the game in just two weeks,” bragged Audi’s press release for the Audi A4 Driving Challenge (Free, aka Audi A4 Challenge). No doubt.
This free simulator shouldn’t be confused with Sony’s 10-year-old Porsche Challenge, or really any other cool driving game released in the past two decades. Instead, it’s an overhead-view game where you’re doing nothing but maneuvering around test tracks filled with orange cones.
Drive poorly, as you probably will, and you’ll either hit a bunch of cones or steer so far outside of them that you won’t really be racing the course.
In order to keep you from driving off the edges of the screen, the game basically pilots you around all of the curves of the track automatically anyway, so that you’re basically just trying to keep the iPhone or iPod touch turning gently enough—like a steering wheel—to stay on the road. Fun? Interesting? Informative about the Audi A4? Absolutely not. In fact, playing this is discouraging us from wanting to take a test drive; if driving the real car is anything like this, we’ll stick to what we’ve got.
