Ground Effect Pro XHD | Life of Android

The Story

Borrowing heavily from Nintendo’s Wave Race franchise, Ground Effect Pro is an arcade app with a time trial edge. Your goal is to dash through a series of checkpoints with the aim of overtaking your fellow competitors and finishing in first place after three laps round some tricky terrain. This is a fast, furious and, most of all, fun app which will keep you entertained for hours to come.

The Experience

Ground Effect Pro takes us back to our hallowed youth when we used to spend forever and a day in front of the TV, trying to trim fractions of a second off our Wave Race 64 time trial records. We were grievously fixated with that cartridge classic and so it’s no real surprise that Jackyl, creators of the excellent Spirit HD, have come up trumps again by sticking to a magic formula.

In this case, the formula of speeding through checkpoints in the quickest possible time has been modified slightly with the addition of motion controls. Tilt your Android handset forward and your hovercraft/plane thing will zoom ahead, tilt your Android to the right and it will begin to curve its course of motion. This all works pretty well with a neat balance achieved so that you don’t veer sharply off course at the slightest fumble of your smartphone.

Although Ground Effect Pro boasts 3D graphics, which you can apparently view in proper “Stereoscopic 3D” if you have a spare pair of glasses to hand, they aren’t particularly pretty. All water is daubed in a solid blue and all land is painted in an unsightly mix of luminous green and muddy brown, yet you’ll be far too concerned with staying in control of your vehicle to worry about a slightly ropey set of landscapes. Thankfully, the courses themselves are incredibly well designed making for a challenging game where each level takes a solid amount of effort to complete alive, let alone in pole position.

Ultimately, Ground Effect Pro is an app that’ll you’ll love because of its intense and throughly enjoyable gameplay. For £1.99 as well, it certainly exceeds many a similar offering on such a humble price tag. Plus if you’re as ancient as us, it may well inspire you to dig out your old Nintendo consoles from the attic.