What’s on this week
Motorsport Manager Mobile 3 is the latest entry in a series which began on mobiles, moved to the desktop, and is now back in the pocket with augmented reality features.
The pinnacle of the franchise, 2016’s Motorsport Manager for PC, felt like a cross between the classic Grand Prix Manager games and Football Manager – famous for taking up hours of gamers’ lives.
That’s some follow-up act for a mobile game. The temptation would be to try to port a full desktop version into a mobile edition, entailing various compromises.
Instead, MMM3 hones the essence of its predecessor while applying tweaks that fit a mobile simulation perfectly. It marks a big step up from the previous mobile entries.
That’s abundantly clear in qualifying, in which a new card-based system offers a risk-versus-reward approach to set-up that will either gain a driver precious tenths of a second or send you back to square one. It’s simplistic but highly engaging and can be crucial. Elsewhere, the pitstop menus and the looks of the racing interface follow the game series’ tradition.
The graphics do offer two irritations, though. While extensive work has gone into generating the 3D world of the tracks – to the point that you can see aeroplanes fly over – the cars are represented by circular icons. Considering how fun it was to select the livery for your team, it’s disappointing to find out that it’s only a token gesture.
The augmented reality that launches with IOS devices is a great technical demonstration and fits into the gaming industry’s greater push for mainstream virtual reality. But in MMM3 it’s clunky and very sensitive to your environment, making it far from ideal anywhere away from your kitchen table or desk – which is rather limiting for a mobile game.
AR capabilities were a big part of the game’s launch, as was the fact that MMM3 offers six championships, with the addition of endurance racing – the most challenging.
In the ‘45-minute’ races, you’ll have to balance the driving times of three competitors, who fatigue over a stint, as well as managing tyre life and fuel. It’s a lot to take in at once, and running two cars adds extra difficulty. While Autosport was able to get one car onto the podium by taking two