Title: Pixel Traffic: Circle Rush
Developer: For Kids
Publisher: For Kids
Release date: 2017-08-30
Regular price: 1,99 €
Bundled:      ☐Yes ☒No
Achievements: ☑Yes ☐No
Cards:        ☐Yes ☒No

Estimated total reading time: 4 minutes, 9 seconds. Contains 830 words.

Grabbed this during the last xmas sale, I admit I had put my eyes on it since they released it but I had not intention of buying it at such high price. Instead, the night of the 23rd I was at my parents’ home and didn’t want to make too much noise as they were already sleeping (and my laptop can be quite noisy when I play “heavy” games) so I had to say no to Rise of the Tomb Raider (which I had just started) and, don’t know how, I ended up buying this (for 0,49€, not the best of the discounts..) and played it immediately.

Idea is nice: you control a car that doesn’t fully stop, you can only accelerate or brake based on your guts to avoid incoming cars. (There are motorbikes too but they are “enemies” only, you can’t unlock them)

Base map has two circular roads that cross in two points, one road is only for you and the other is for other cars. The tricky part is at those intersections =P
As time passes, more cars appear, making it more difficult for you to survive. My best so far is 29 laps, don’t remember which difficulty I was in when I reached it and the game has only one highscore for both difficulties. Clever, right? :v
The other cars, true, can’t appear on your road but they appear randomly on the others: this means that a car can spawn right next to you when you’re crossing the road and you can’t do anything to avoid it :(
Every lap you also collect 2 coins; this was the worst performing part as the game freezed whenever I was close to the coins. Sometimes it was very brief (almost unnoticeable) sometimes longer, with the car that didn’t collect the coins and “reappeared” too close to the intersection to avoid crashes.

And we arrive at the worst part of all: when you lose, there’s no restart button! D:
You have to go to main menu and start a new game.. very comfy in a game whose matches are usually short.
You can’t even buy more cars at once; buy one -> main menu -> shop -> scroll back up to the point you were seconds ago.
«HEY! What are you doing? I said SCROLL. With your mouse. Not with the wheel. Click – and now drag. Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work well, arrows are not allowed.»

So, on the store they advertising as having the following Features:

Simple and easy controls

TRUE. Yet they don’t tell you which these controls are, you have to figure it out by yourself -_-

Amazing graphics

meh, if you say so..

Tons of game difficulties to choose from

FALSE. Game has only two variant: an easy mode (which consists of said two circular roads that intersect each other) and a hard mode (which adds a straight road that horizontally cross those circular ones).

A wide variety of different cars

TRUE. Unfortunately, only their appearance is difference, their engine is the same -_- Which is even more stupid if you think that other cars in game go at different speeds!

Lots of amazing achievements

Lots = 39
30 of these are assigned to each car; everytime you buy one you unlock one. You unlock 1 more when you buy alk the cars.
3 are awarded for collecting coins (which you can use only to buy cars..) they aren’t even tied up with the total you need to buy them all (I would have made top-tier higher than the total cost anyway). And they said they also lowered prices because people were complaining they were too high. mah!
The remaining 5 (finally!) are awarded for completing some challenges. Not really hard but still something :)

From what I’ve seen so far, it looks more like a company better at marketing than at making games, a pity because some look nice timewasters. I mean, their games don’t even have cards so they must be truly trying.
I think they either need better programmers or better playtesters; the problem lies in one (both?) of those areas.
Little spoiler: between the time I played this and the time I’m writing this review, I’ve also won and played Pixel Traffic: Risky Bridge; review will come but I can already tell you it has all the negative perks of this one.
If you’re wondering why such a simple game requires 240MB of your HD, it’s because it dowloads Windows, Linux and Mac versions -_-

My favourite car