Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Okay, the cars whiz around the track with amazing intelligence. That part is great. Shooting and disabling the enemy (i.e. wife and daughter) is great. Think laser tag with little cars. They shoot invisible beams at each other (actually calculated by your Ipod or Iphone) and disable each other while whizzing around the track. HOWEVER, the game concept is stupid. It appears that the designers of the software got stuck in the "power up and attain magical abilities" video game paradigm. In theory this sounds great. Here's the theory: as you play and win, you get points. You can trade the points in for upgrades to your cars. These upgrades include powerful armor (that makes you harder to kill), stronger weapons to counter armor, and the ability to do U turns and sudden stops. I've got to admit the U turns and stops are cool. Apparently the game theory is that serious gamers will buy the cars, upgrade as much as possible, and then compete with each other. But as I explain below, this theory makes the game NOT FUN for families or other casual players. At $200, plus $70 per extra cars, this is a lot of money for something that's frustrating. So what's the problem? The software designers forgot this isn't a video game where you're playing against a computer AI. (You CAN play against AI controlled cars, but that's not a lot of fun compared to playing real people.) The problem is that you can't remove "fixed" special weapons from the cars, and you can't remove armor. For example, to start, we had three cars, two whose special "fixed" weapons are tractor beams, and the third whose special weapon is a shield. The tractor beam slows down the car in front so you have a better chance of shooting it. The shield lets you take a lot of hits without being disabled. It quickly became clear that whoever had the shielded car had a huge advantage over the 2 cars with tractor beams. You could basically shoot the shielded car forever without disabling it. As you can imagine, this caused some bad feelings! We tried to compensate for this by saying that the weakest player always got the shielded car. But this was a lame solution. The obvious problem to the upgrade model is that 1) someone gets more points, 2) they upgrade, 3) this gives them a big advantage so they get still more points, and 4) they win more games get more points, upgrade more, etc. So they basically run away from the competition and become unbeatable. For example, our sneaky daughter, after racking up thousands of points, upgraded her armor a lot, making her car almost unkillable at the weapon levels of the other cars. The weaker cars had to use the dubious strategy of running around the track as fast as possible like small terrified rodents. So essentially The designers created a game that isn't really a family game, or even a game for friends, because you can't level the playing field. They need to develop software that allows the players to reset the cars to defaults, where everyone is even. Or better yet, allow adding and removing weapons and armor without the stupid point system. This way it would be easy to level the playing field, or assign handicaps to better players by giving more abilities or weapons to poorer players (like poor old dad, who, after all, foots the bill). It would be fun to play a game in which one person said, "I want to play this game with no shields, a powerful weapons, and the ability to stop dead." And another player says, I'm going for powerful shields and the ability to U turn." It's sad that such a potentially awesome game is crippled by the myopia of the developers. They did just release a software upgrade that does allow removing some upgrades. But the critical special weapons and armor is still not removable. I'll upgrade this review if they do a significant upgrade of the software.