Review: Ducati Moto for the iPhone
Faced with a 24 hour travel time to get back to the US from my Christmas vacation in New Zealand, I was only too open to any distraction that would help me pass the time. Consequently it didn’t take much to add Vir2L Studio’s new Ducati Moto game to my iPod Touch. Is this new Ducati game worth you dropping $3.99 on?
The App Store may be packed with thousands of apps but precious few have anything to do with Ducati. The last iPhone app I reviewed was pretty lame and thankfully, Ducati Collection is no longer available on the store!
Ducati Moto was released just in time for Christmas and features the chance to ride 8 different Ducatis through the streets of a city ranging from the humble Monster 696 up to the range topping Desmosedici RR. You compete with virtual riders, racing for money so you can afford to buy a better bike. Along the way you can perform wheelies and stoppies by tilting the device whilst you accelerate and initiate power sliding with a a virtual controller on the bottom right of the screen.
What’s it like to play?
Ducati Moto is firmly in the arcade style. Bizarrely each time you start the game a 30 second promo Ducati video plays which becomes old pretty quickly although you can tap the screen and hit ‘Done’ to stop it. You start by riding around a city, navigating with the built in map where necessary looking for other riders to race. You bet on the outcome and if you win your bank balance is improved. The races can be head to head only over a course or several laps of a pseudo circuit with many competitors.
Controls are fairly intuitive, you tilt the iPhone to steer and perform stoppies or wheelies whereas the virtual controller pad is used for acceleration and braking. This controller also allows you to power slide the bike which turns out to be useful out of the tighter turns.
The center of the city contains the Ducati store where you can check out and buy more powerful and faster models that include the Hypermotard 1100S, Streetfighter, 1098R and the aforementioned Desmosedici.
Gameplay is less intuitive as at times I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. I wasted lots of time rather boringly riding around the city looking for someone to race before I realized that you can select the place to go by simply tapping it on the map. As you get more money you get more options for races and the amount you can win increases.
So far so good but there are some weaknesses. There is no real sense of acceleration or speed at and the game frame-rate seems quite low. This may be related to my 1st generation iPod Touch which doesn’t have the CPU grunt of the later models. The graphics are okay but the platform is capable of much more. Finally the sound is mediocre. All of the bikes seem to sound the same and not much like a Ducati.
In summary, Ducati Moto is a good start, but it has a ways to go before being a fully polished app that can be termed a must-have. It feels like it is still in beta and I hope Vir2L has plans to upgrade it over time. Still credit must be given for the effort to bring Ducati fans something of their very own in the Apple App Store!
Ducati Moto is available from the the Apple App Store for $3.99 for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
A review copy of Ducati Moto was supplied by Vir2L Studios
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