You know, I think I’m really liking Firemint’s style. You might have heard of one of their other games, Flight Control? Well, they’re also the makers of Real Racing, a premium $9.99 racing title for the iPhone. Now one of the first things that comes to mind when most iPhone users (myself included) see a $10 app — let alone a game — is: is it even worth it? I’ve bought a couple of apps and games at this price point and have been sorely disappointed. A $10 app in the App Store’s primarily $0.99 climate had better really bring home the bacon. Well, folks, I’m glad to report that Firemint is absolutely worth the price of admission, and it’s one of the most polished experiences you’ll find on the App Store to date. It’s also one hell of a racing game.

Working Your Way Up
There’s a lot of meat to real racing, but the basic skeletal structure is this: you enter a qualifying race and to try beat a certain track time — once you do so, you can participate in an event for one of the four car classes. There are 24 races in eight events, three difficulties for you to compete in, and cars for you to unlock as you win. If at any point you tire of just racing in career mode, you can participate in a quick race or time trial with the cars you’ve unlocked, you can play a local multiplayer match over wi-fi, or enter an online league. The leagues are a bit more complicated than a simple match, since some are timed events and you never actually see other players in-game. Instead, you complete against the lap times of other players as they complete them. You’ll usually have a little while to complete a race before your final score is due — which means you can repeat a race until you get the best score you possibly can — but on the higher levels of play I heard the timer can be as low as ten minutes per track. Considering the fact that I take about 4-5 mins to finish a race, this would give pros maybe three times to try for an optimal time before they submit their final score. There aren’t any prizes for kicking ass and chewing bubble gum (err, winning a race), but there is glory.

A Smooth Ride
But speaking of glory — haha, segue! — have you seen how glorious this game looks? Real Racing nails the sense of speed and the feeling of being behind the wheel. Your HUD will shift forward and back as you speed up, slow down, or collide with other cars. The only thing that isn’t well done is the vibration — you’ll feel the roughness of certain patches of road via the iPhone, but the device stays strangely still when you smash into another car at 120mph. Aside from that little hiccup, Real Racing is one of the more realistic racers on the iPhone so far. You don’t shift gears, but you’ll want to smartly brake and slow down around corners instead of trying to drift and ballerina dance around one Fast and Furious style — well, unless you like losing.

The steering is pretty much perfect in Real Racing, and Firemint has set up controls for most any gamer under the sun. You can touch to steer, touch to brake or accelerate, or just leave everything on automatic and focus on not steering yourself into the wall. There’s a great little feature in Real Racing to help you out while you get used to the controls: it’s called Brake Assist. Imagine sitting beside a very conservative driver who slams on the brakes for you every time you reach a corner, just enough so that you can concentrate on accelerating properly around the bend. That would be brake assist, and you can scale it up and down using a handy dandy slider. I liked it at first, but I turned it off as my driving got gradually less pathetic. Lastly, you can touch the top of the screen to glance at the rear-view mirror, or touch the top-right and toggle the in-dash view or a 3rd-person behind-the-car perspective.

Vroom and Vroom
Make no mistake: this must have been Firemint’s motto, since the game throws frames almost non-stop at you like a champ (tested on a 2G and 3GS). Once you get to some of the higher class races you might need to run a memory program like iStat to redeem some RAM points, but overall Real Racing runs very, very smoothly. Even when you’re in the menus, a lot of care has gone into the design of the UI so as not to take you out of the experience. There’s slick lobby music as you select your cars and all the beeps of a hi-tech sounding interface as you tap on buttons. Oh, and speaking of sound:
It’s also a pretty darn loud game. I lent my iPhone to a friend one time while I did some chores, and I could hear the roar of the engine from two rooms down when on max volume. Another great feature of the game is how seamlessly they provide access to the iPod library. When you pause the game you’ll see a music icon on the lower right — just tap this, set up your own playlist, and rock out.

Conclusion

So the question now is: should you buy Real Racing? Let me make this easy on you: if you like racing, the shapes of steering wheels, or the words “1st place” at all, then yeah, you should probably buy Real Racing. I said it at the start of this review, and I’ll say it again: its one of the few games on the App Store that really feels like it deserves the current “9.99″ feature price point. This is the kind of quality that consoles like the PSP and the DS struggle to achieve and with a control scheme that’s really unique to the iPhone, and when you look at it that way, Real Racing’s a steal. Really.

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The App Store link to Firemint’s Real Racing ($9.99) is right here.