AG Drive: Extreme, G.

AG Drive (3.99) is a game that demands your attention and focus, a hardcore racer for the hardcore racing fan. Boosts, upgrades, twisting tracks, sharp turns, and stunning visuals will overwhelm your cerebral cortext if you're not ready. As fun as MMX Racing is, AG Drive is the more robust game and spectacular, hands down.

Steeped in the legacy of F-Zero and WipeOut, AG Drive reminds me most of  Extreme-G on the N64, due primarily nostalgia and not design choices. Extreme-G is the first and only racing game I've 'beat' - unlocked the all the cars, came in first in ever race, and so on. Sure, it was due to a handy cheat-code and strategy guide and assistance of my friend Brendan, but such is memory.

Like Extreme G on the N64, AG Drive delivers a blistering sense of speed in a futuristic world that exists primarily as an excuse to create elaborate race tracks that violate the laws of physics gleefully. Twists, turns, jumps, boosts, and loops are all present and accounted for.

Those jumps, boosts, and loops come at your eyeballs via a silky-smooth 60 frames per second, with millions of polygons rendered per frame, per second, if the press release is to be believed. Even if you don't, there is no denying the game is a visual marvel, and 100% solid in terms of visual and graphical oomph. If Bungie wanted to buy up this game and release it as a mobile 'Destiny'-branded racer, the only thing you'd need to change is the name - the game is that polished visually.

Handling is a slightly different story. There are options for touch controls and tilt controls. Tilt controls work great, but take quite a bit of time to get comfortable with - but considering AG Drive is a hardcore racer in every sense of the word, getting a handle on the handling (and upgrading your vehicle to have better handling) is part of the challenge. It's not that the controls are bad, it's that you'll feel bad at them for quite some time.

The touch controls are flat-out bad, with the buttons being too small on a typical iPhone screen, resulting in missing turns or under steering or over steering and missing an important boost jump. If you're playing on your phone and don't mind taking a bit of time to learn the tilt controls - you're in for a great time. However, if you're on an iPad and don't want to flail it around like a toy airplane, you'll find the virtual button control scheme occasionally frustrating due to a lack of finesse.

When you toss in upgrades, multiple tracks, time trials, leaderboards, and other bells and whistles, there's no way AG Drive isn't a must-play for hardcore race fans eager for a speed-fix on iOS. It's an evolution and an eye opener for what the platform is capable of if a studio is willing to devote time, resources, and passion to creating a premium product - heck, Zorg Entertainment's founder sold his collection of 1980s Transformers to fund this thing.

While AG Drive isn't more than meets the eye and won't change your mind if you're not already a racing fan, what *does* meet the eye is spectacular, bright, exciting, challenging, and everything a fan of F-Zero or Wipeout HD would hope it to be - nothing more, nothing less.