LightBike 2 has some great new features, and plenty of cool visual style, but persistent technical troubles and excessive add-ons prevent thisLightBike 2 has some great new features, and plenty of cool visual style, but persistent technical troubles and excessive add-ons prevent this racer from ever being considered as high quality as the original. LB2's main problem is its lag - since agility and reaction time has always been such a major part of LightBike, players need to have their vehicles move the moment fingers touch the screen. However, there is a highly noticeable lag in LightBike 2 (a fault not present in the superb LightBike 1), so your vehicles don't respond to your touch instantly. This means that even the most experienced players are likely to crash quickly due to the game's unresponsiveness.
There are graphical issues as well. LB2's backgrounds and vehicles are sleeker and more detailed than LB1's; however, there is a distinct choppy look to a lot of it. This would be tolerable; however, a much more gameplay-hindering glitch is that the jetwalls left behind the racers are incredibly thin, so that if you are racing parallel to another LightBike (and this happens a lot), the wall is barely visible, and it is hard to tell if turning will end up having you crash into an invisible, two-dimensional wall.
LightBike 2 isn't terrible. There are many improvements to the original game, one of them being the jump feature, which allows racers to strategically jump over other racers' jetwalls. There is also a new "Turbo Boost" feature, which is basically the same as "boost", except much, much, faster - but a whole lot less useful. The Turbo Boost rockets your LightBike to incredibly high speeds - so high, in fact, that most times you use it, you will instantly end up outside the map. Control over Turbo Boosts is even more limited by that constant lag I mentioned above. Even if the control was easier, there is no apparent benefit to ever using the Turbo Boost.
Pankaku did try with this game. They updated the soundtrack, improved the network mode, gave players the ability to customize their vehicles, and included different types of maps. However, next time, I'd like to see some more effort on the actual gameplay experience, rather than simply cramming as many different extra features as they can onto one small iOS game. LightBike 2, downloadable for free, can be plenty of fun for a little while, but simply does not measure up to the simple controls of the original, even if the LB1 was slightly lacking in extra features than in more mainstream games.… Expand
