Mashable
Anki Overdrive is high-speed, super-smart racing joy
I’ve been a race car driver for as long as I can reminisce — in movie games, of course. It’s been a good existence. Driving at over one hundred fifty MPH under a launching space shuttle (thanks, Asphalt 8) can be fairly a thrill, but there has been something missing: the visceral feel of live activity. That is, until recently, when I was contesting on a conference table-sized supple track with lil’, yet remarkably intelligent race cars that are all part of the upcoming Anki Overdrive.
The name Anki may be familiar to some of you. It was the surprise guest at Apple’s two thousand thirteen World Broad Developer’s conference where it unveiled Anki Drive, a robotics-based race car game the combined an iOS App control system with a real track and electrified fucktoy race cars. The $200 final product, which arrived in stores that October, was pretty incredible. It featured an oval-pre-printed rack and two cars that could read the road, see each other and connected via Bluetooth to the Anki app.
Pic: Mashable, Mark Andrew Boyer
With Anki Overdrive, tho’, Anki has gone more than a few steps further, creating what may be the best possible version of the classic slot-based, physical racing games. Each $150 commenced kit comes ten lumps of straight and curved limber track that snap together magnetically. There’s also some elevation lumps, a four-car charging base and a tire cleaner. During my time with the set, we must have done three or four different configurations. I only wish the slot systems of my childhood had been so effortless.
As with the original set, Anki Overdrive includes two cars, however all the light-weight, palm-sized racers (extra ones cost $49 a lump) now benefit from the design chops of Harald Belker, the designer responsible for the look of the vehicles in Tron Legacy and Batman and Robin (you can’t blame him for the quality of those films). Anki’s cars include their own personalities and driving styles. Skull, for example, is a high-speed racer that features a canon. In Anki Overdrive, the “commander’ you choose in the app further modifies the driving style, whether you’re controlling the cars, or not. Anki representative told me that these fresh virtual race car drivers make it feel like you’re racing against a human instead of the computer (tho’, if it’s just you, you are racing against a computer).
One of the reasons Anki Overdrive works so well is that, to be fair, you are not entirely in control. Each race starts with all the cars, whether you have one or four on the track, leisurely driving around the track while one of them ingests the infrared information embedded in each pliable track section. Once it has read the layout, it can share it with the other race cars. I love how, after consuming the layout, all the cars would automatically line up at the embark line.
The countdown then starts within the app and the cars take off.
There are a number of different racing styles including a 15-lap race where you strive to be very first and a King of the Hill mode. I very likely loved the straight racing style the most. Anki Overdrive cars will stay on the track on their own, but you can go prompt enough to go flying off. Originally, I played in a level where, no matter how swift I went, I never left the track, but then the Anki reps enabled a burst mode, which I learned to use on straightaways (if I did it on forms, I flew off the track). During the race, I titled the iPhone (you can race against other iPhone or Android users or against the cars) from side-to-side to steer back and forward across the track. This was good for cutting off other drivers or even forcing them right off the track.
Anki Overdrive cars have personality and so do their virtual drivers (Commanders) who have particular driving styles, dearest track setups and their own ways of celebrating.
The more I played, the more competitive I became. Plus, more racing and more wins meant better spectacle and more weapons I could use through the game. I admit, it would be joy to endlessly race around a multiplicity off track layouts, but the built-in extensibility — that similarity to a movie race game — is one of the things that makes Anki Overdrive special. The other thing is all the ways the cars, which are basically computers, can interact with each other. During one of my races, I used one car’s virtual grappling hook to shoot at another cars can slow it down. There’s also a lot of sound to consume. The cars make a sort of clicking sound as they hum around the track and the entire time I was racing, the iPhone app played accompanying sounds affects and added cheesy voice overs that, I assume, kids will appreciate.
Anki Overdrive’s Controller is brainy, elementary and easy-to-use.
During my hands-on practice, we had four or five cars at our disposition, so we always had at least two cars to race. Anki Overdrive cars, including the two cars that ship with the starter set, Skull and Groundshock, can run for twenty five minutes on a charge.
Anki Overdrive ships on September twenty and while Anki has no plans for micro-transactions, the manufacturers promise that the game will grow and switch over time with downloadable updates. Plus you can always add more and more track chunks, like a four-way intersection “Collision Kit” and extra elevation rails. At one point we build a four-inch hop gap for the cars, which, when they had enough speed, most of the cars made without a problem.
As I observed the Anki team pack up Anki Overdrive, I had a little pang of nostalgia for my own old Marx racing set. Of course, that one took an hour to set up and the cars usually broke down in inbetween every race. Anki Overdrive, on the other mitt, is one of the best illustrations I’ve seen to date of what robotics and artificial intelligence can do for real world fucktoys and movie games.