You might remember when we here at iFanzine previously looked ay Racing Tyres Space (our review); a game that we felt had a ton of potential, but was currently being held back by some unfortunate issues making it way harder than it needed to be. However — if you’ve been paying attention to our comments section since then — you might be aware that the game’s developer, Olivier PARRA, has continued to actively update their game. Now — with Racing Tyres Space currently set at Version 1.4 — virtually everything that we suggested the game’s developers try out to improve their game has already been implemented, asking the question of how does the game now fare after all those changes?
To put it bluntly: much better, actually.
What couldn’t be properly appreciated when we posted our original review — due to us being stuck on level two — is that Racing Tyres Space is actually a puzzle game, rather than just being about nailing a series of curves perfectly while moving at mach nine. Knowledge of this greater truth became abundantly apparent when we finally reached the game’s third level, wherein we where faced with these enigmatic yellow switches that initially seemed to be unreliable regarding when they’d flip. What we slowly came to realize was that these yellow switches — unlike the blue ones before them — would only activate if you were going slowly, and had to all be activated in order to succeed. Figuring out how to finish stage three within the time limit — by being fast during the longer stretches, yet still slowing down enough to successfully hit the curiously behaved yellow switches — completely changed the entire feeling of Racing Tyres Space for us.
Enabling us to better enjoy the game’s true flavor were a wide variety of tweaks including: expanded time limits, the ability to keep exploring a track after you failed, special training courses that wordlessly introduce new game play mechanics, and more. Perhaps the most appreciated of Racing Tyres Space’s tweaks was that the fact that they better separated the Level Select and Restart buttons, which — although we suggested it ourselves — turned out to be a far more vital game play change than we ever imagined. During level three’s fast paced game of stop and go — even despite the expanded time limit — we quickly learned that a single failure meant immediately restarting, since charging past any of the slow-switches would deposit you down an inescapable pit.
Now don’t confuse what we’re saying here as confirmation that the game is now in Easy Mode, as Racing Tyres Space is still a fast-paced game of brutal difficulty and tight timing. The key difference now is that the game actually feels as though you can eventually persevere through practice and patience, rather than — per our previous comments — only if you were more familiar with the game’s levels than the developers. For those of you whom haven’t yet tried Racing Tyres Space, there’s never been a better time to begin hitting the accelerator; and as for the rest of you, you might want to start redownloading the game now so that you may see all of these improvements for yourself.