A Pay Wall That Would Make Trump Proud – Real Racing 3 Review

If you just get this game know a few things: DONT PLAY WITH YOUR PHONE CONNECTED TO INTERNET. DONT USE GOLD FOR COSMETICS OR TO SPEED UP WAIT TIMES. DONT CONNECT TO FACEBOOK. I want to be as transparent as possible. The prices for the cars in the game are fairly consistent with the real world (aside from collector classics). And payouts for races is believable; $1700 here, $3000 there. But the price and steps for upgrades are crazy. You have seven categories (suspension, exhaust, brakes, etc.), each category has at least three upgrades. You have to purchase each step of the upgrade to fully max out your car. And some of the more expensive categories have up to nine steps you have to purchase. Early on it’s not that bad: $1000 for an engine swap in your dinky VW bug nine times isn’t the end of the world. Add on $500 for the brakes a few times and you end up spending about $21k on upgrades for your starter car. And then you want to upgrade the nicer cars. The Mustang GT500’s last four engine upgrades are $157000. A piece. You’ve got to drop way more than $700k on just one car to finish upgrading it. In a game where later, better cars cost $250k, $300k, maybe even $2.1 mil to purchase. Good luck getting the funds when you’re spending that amount two or three times over upgrading your cars just to win races that pay $3000 a pop. But the upgrades wouldn’t really be mission critical if it weren’t for the online players. The game sets you up against other players whose or may not have finished upgrading their car (insert gripe about people using their credit cards for a mobile game). This means the first race you get to take out your shiny new BMW M class you have to go up against someone that’s already spent the time grinding (or real money) to get their car to peak performance. I rarely, if ever win a race against a fully upgraded car on sheer skill. I do every race twice: once connected to wifi to download the assets needed to run the race, then a second time on airplane mode to remove the online bots and just race the AIs. My results are far more encouraging the second time, with a much better payout. For some reason if my phone storage is on its last 10GB free then all of the in game downloads of all the graphics, courses, cars, race modes, and AIs get deleted. So to play I have to re download everything every time I erroneously let the game stop running in the background. I’m sure this complaint is user error, but I could stand being looked into. They used to have a smart watch app that would grind races for you, meaning you could log back on the phone app and enjoy the progress the watch app made for you, but this was taken down because it was deemed unfair to those that don’t have smart watches. I get their point, but my watch didn’t cost more than what I’ve spend in real money buying in-game currency in an attempt to keep up for limited time events. I digress. The racing is fun, and they have a huge library of cars to look through. The graphics are gorgeous, and the race tracks are based on real world tracks, so that’s cool. I’m just frustrated with how much grinding I’ve had to do. That’s all.
Review by Tall1b52 on Real Racing 3.