Jet Car Stunts Review

In the pursuit of both things to write about and ways to stop money from burning a hole in my pocket, I happened upon Jet Car Stunts on the marketplace. Expecting some kind of stellar narrative where you, the plucky protagonist, must stand up against the hordes of evil in a universe that would put Tolkien to shame, I was greeted with a game about a Jet Car… that does Stunts…  Welcome to the Ronseal of game titles. Allow me to have some fun here.

Taking more than just a leaf out of Trials’ handbook, Plane Vehicle Tricks steals an entire bush. Given various levels which increase in difficulty, you’re tasked with either navigating your way to the exit, completing a time trial of the course, or collecting stars dotted around the landscape, using the titular Jet Car to rocket boost over jumps and lament the aerial capabilities of your mode of transport.

For a paltry £4, you can forgive the “straight-line” levels of simplicity offered by Propulsion Automobile Manoeuvres, with levels consisting of basic geometry on a stock image skybox, if the game was any good… Which it isn’t.  Controlling the vehicle in the air has a somewhat Lunar Lander quality: the car is guided more by momentum than by user input. That’s great for Lunar Lander, which can be controlled on a 2D plane.  Aircraft Motorcar Aerobatics is on a 3D plane, making car control in mid-air range from atrocious to insipid, as you struggle with a camera that could induce motion sickness at a moment’s notice.

This is somewhat of a shame really, as the "Jet" and "Stunt" aspects let the whole game down. On the ground, when you're only a "Car", the game handles beautifully, drifting around corners with relative ease. You begin to resent the jumps and the awkward in-air controls, preferring the sweet embrace of Terra Firma... Or at least a solidity of a texture-less cube.

This game is designed for one purpose: waiting. “Oh, GTA is taking a while to install. Guess I’ll play The Stunting Adventures of Jet Car!” Games that you can dip in and out of whilst waiting for an ever increasing average install time are going to become more marketable as this current generation continues. But this game isn’t the start of that movement. It feels like a GripShift rip-off in the worst kind of way. For the uninitiated, GripShift was a PSP game about a Jet Car of sorts that had an inclination towards Stunts, and it was 10 times better than this game. Please, avoid Airliner Sedan Feats at all costs.

Overall: 4/10 –A great "Car" attached to some truly horrendous "Jet Stunts".