Review: Fare City: First Shift
November 25, 2009
The Overview
Fare City is a new entry into the line drawing genre from Finkly Interactive. You control taxis, picking up and dropping off fares throughout the city. Each fare is color-coded to their drop-off point and each has a different reward score. Rather than endingthe game after a single crash, like so many other path drawing games, Fare City gives you extra chances in the form of car insurance. Build up enough as you play and, theoretically, you could play indefinitely. But, the game keeps throwing more and more taxis for you to handle as the game progresses. Eventually, juggling them all becomes increasingly difficult and the crashes inevitable. Fares get irate if you ignore them long enough and you lose the money you would have otherwise made from them. One of my favorite features: the map wraps around the screen, much like the old school Asteroids.
The Features
Sit at the main menu and watch the lights of the buildings in the city go on and off. Be amazed at the very detailed set of instructions (they even teach you how to read the instructions). These are some of the first signs of the amount of spit and polish that has gone into the app. Lots of coding effort must have gone into making this a very lean and responsive game. Even on my 1st Gen iPod Touch, the game never slowed down. I could have a half a dozen taxis, just as many destination markers, and twice as many fares hailing cabs - all of them bouncing around the screen at once and nary a hiccup. You can challenge friends to beat you scores by email and see if you can make it onto the worldwide Top 1000 leaderboard. Fare City has three speed modes for harder challenges and, unlike so many other games, gives you bonus points for playing at the higher speeds.The Breakdown
The Good
The game is extremely fun and the fast pace gets very challenging, but never feels frustrating. In most other line drawing games, you lose as soon as you make one mistake (usually missing a new object coming in on the edge of the screen).
Fare City implements an 'insurance' system - basically lives that you earn through good driving. When two of your taxis invariabally collide, you lose one point of collision insurance and the crashed taxis are removed from service. The graphics have just the right level of detail for an overhead, 2D game and the sounds and music are not distracting or annoying.
The Bad
The biggest flaw is the fact that right now there is only one map. However, the developers even state in the app description that there are more to come.
Pink, magenta, light purple and light red. You would think these colors would not be too tough to tell apart. But when you are frantically trying to direct half a dozen fares to destinations all over the map, you (okay, okay _I_) often mistake one for another. The results are loaded taxis just wandering all over the board not dropping off their fare and lots of angry new fares because I did not have empty taxis with which to pick them up.
The leaderboard is a letdown. It takes a LONG time to scroll through 1000 people. But version 1.1 is supposed to include Open Feint.
