Reckless Racing Ultimate is an Xbox Live title for Windows 8 that has you behind the wheel and tackling a wide range of road and dirt tracks.
Reckless Racing Ultimate features 24 vehicles, 20 career mode cups to win, 50 arcade challenges and more than 150 customizable events. Graphics are outstanding, game play challenging and Reckless Racing Ultimate is an entertaining game for your Windows 8 computer, be it a laptop, desktop or tablet.
Reckless Racing Ultimate is centered around your garage. You can launch races, access gaming options, view your Xbox achievements, and fine tune your vehicles.
Gaming options include a help/about menu, graphics settings, control options, audio settings, and general game play options. Control options include on-screen controls (best for tablets), keyboard controls (for laptops), controller options (for USB Xbox controllers).
Reckless Racing Ultimate has two modes, career and arcade challenges. The career mode has you competing to earn the twenty career cups. Each cup is a series of races that progressively get more challenging. Arcade mode is a collection of fifty challenges for your to complete. There is a multiplayer mode where you can challenge your Xbox friends.
As you complete races you'll win money that can be used to purchase, upgrade and customize your vehicles.
Game play with Reckless Racing Ultimate isn't much different than any other racing game. You have tracks ranging from street, dirt, gravel, and a mixture of conditions. Controls are nice and responsive but the on-screen controls do take some getting used to. The vehicle handling is fun with drifting through turns and even when you spin out of control if you hit things too fast. You can use some barricades (and other race cars) to help control your skids but some barricades are temporary and will give way to the weight of your car.
While game play is entertaining, Reckless Racing Ultimate has very impressive graphics. From garage view to the road signs that snap when run into to the cars burning rubber, it's very hard to find anything bad about Reckless Racing Ultimate's graphic quality.
Overall, Reckless Racing Ultimate is a fun, challenging, well presented Windows 8 Xbox title. The weak point on tablets is the controls but not to the point of driving you nuts. It just takes a little time to get used to the orientation. Shame you don't have a control option to use your accelerometer for steering. Bottom line, if you like racing games Reckless Racing Ultimate for Windows 8 is well worth checking out. It wouldn't make for a bad Windows Phone game.
There is a free trial for Reckless Racing Ultimate that gives you access to the first racing cup, one arcade challenge and access to car upgrades. The full version of Reckless Racing Ultimate is running $2.49 and you can find it here in the Windows Store.