Back in May Crescent Moon Games and Snowbolt Interactive teamed up to release one of the more unique iOS titles I’ve played in some time, called Slingshot Racing ($0.99). It’s a top-down racer with a steampunk style that uses a brilliant single-touch control mechanism that’s a perfect fit for the touch screen. The way it works is that every track has an anchor point built into each curve, and touching the screen shoots a grappling hook from your vehicle and attaches it to the anchor point. It’s then a game of timing as you hook onto each anchor point and sling yourself around the curves.
It’s totally fun, and we really felt Slingshot Racing redefined what a racer could be on the iOS platform in our review. One of our only real negatives towards the game were that it felt perfectly suited to an online multiplayer mode, just to spice things up with some real world competition. Well last month we learned that an asynchronous online mode was indeed heading to Slingshot Racing, and today that update has gone live.
The online portion is pretty slick. It lets you create a tournament with 2-4 players made up of Game Center friends or randomly matched strangers. You get to pick which courses are part of this tournament, how many laps must be raced in each race, whether they’re the regular or reversed courses, and if it’s day or night time. You take your turn racing however many laps you’ve chosen and when finished, it tallies up your total time and your best lap time and sends them off to your opponent to give them a shot at beating your time.
It’s a pretty clever way of working multiplayer racing into a game without needing all players to congregate online at once. In addition to the asynchronous mode, this update also has a new bonus single-player campaign with 4 chapters each containing 4 new races. There are also two brand new race tracks, mixed into multiplayer and the new campaign, bringing the total number of tracks for the game up to 10. Finally, a new level of AI difficulty is available along with the usual plethora of fixes and optimizations.
Slingshot Racing was an incredibly fun single-player experience before, and has one of the most entertaining same-device local multiplayer modes on the entire platform. This new asynchronous online multiplayer adds another element to the game, offering real world competition that fits into your own particular schedule. The new courses are great too, so be sure to hit up the App Store to update your game or if you’ve been on the fence about purchasing then check out the free lite version Slingshot Racing Trials.
