Pixel Racer from Daily App Dream has a few good ideas on display – especially the game's crisp control setup – but it is ultimately undone by a lack of polish and a lack of content.

The game is a top-down racer vaguely reminiscent of the light cycles in TRON. A player's bike travels in a straight line, and makes right-angle turns to the left or right when players tap the left or right side of their screen. When a player crashes into a wall, they have to start the stage over. It's as simple as that. The controls are extremely responsive, and I never felt that any deaths weren't my fault.

Despite its name, there is no actual racing on display in Pixel Racer. Players are always the sole bike on each stage, so once a stage is cleared the only replay value is to race against your previous best time. The lack of multiplayer or at least AI-controlled racers feels like a big missed opportunity.

To boot, all the stages feature the same black and red environment, and there is only a single, looping music track. It's things like this that create a general feeling that Pixel Racer is low budget, and just isn't a complete product.

I do give Pixel Racer a lot of credit for its clever method of addressing difficulty. Right from the start, players can select from ten bikes, with speed ratings incrementing from 1-10. I initially thought this was pretty odd, and obviously selected the top-speed bike. But of course, it zipped around the courses so fast that I crashed constantly. I settled on the Speed 2 bike for the remainder of the game.

This is a smart system, because the bike selection also serves as the game's difficulty slider. Once a player has beaten all 24 stages with a Speed 2 bike, the only way to improve their times will be to go back and do it again on speed 3, or speed 4.

But will players want to replay the same handful of stages over and over? Pixel Racer feels a bit like the first world of a game that should have three or four more to follow. The problem is it doesn't.

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