Game Review: Faily Brakes (Mobile – Free to Play)

A mix of endless runner style games & ragdoll physics, Faily Brakes is a free to play game where the main aim is to set a high score as well as earn coins to purchase different types of cars.

Can you guess how this review is going to go?

The premise is simple…the brakes on your car have stopped working forcing you off the road & down an endless slope with all manner of obstacles in your path. The speed is set & all you can do is steer to the left & right to avoid the many obstacles that stand in your way.

Steering isn’t as straightforward as you might think as the cars have an tendency to drift when the buttons are pushed for too long. When you’re trying desperately to move in between trees, rocks & cars a badly timed drift can be the difference between sneaking through small gaps or ending up as a smear across the mountainside.

The further you make it, the higher the score. Even if you crash you’ll be able to gain a little more distance as your driver is launched from the car at speed. This is at least mildly entertaining the first couple of time but like the game as a whole it quickly becomes repetitive & uninteresting.

There just isn’t enough going on to keep you coming back. Earning coins is such a slow process that it hardly feels worth the amount of effort needed to actually get enough to unlock a new car (100 coins). Of course you can earn a few more by watching video ads as well as an occasional gift of extra coins.

Every couple of runs will see an ad pop up on the screen also, it’s not unexpected for a free to play game & they can be disabled with a one-time purchase of any car (the cheapest being 79p). That might seem like a decent deal but bear in mind how little actual gameplay there is here.

In fact that there are so many cars on sale is easily the worst thing about this game. In my store I currently own 3 different cars. There are:

32 cars costing 79p each.
16 cars costing £1.49 each.

…and one car costing £2.29 but is considered a special vehicle giving 1000 credits & double credit pickups when playing.

So if I was to spend real money to buy every car in this game now it would cost me the insane total of £51.41.

The argument on the pro free to play side is always…well you don’t have to actually buy anything, no-one is forcing you. That’s true, I don’t but if a developer wants me to sink time & money into their game than surely they should take the time to actually make a fun, engaging & lengthy experience? Now I’m not asking for 40 hours plus here, anything over a handful would be an improvement.

As it stands Faily Brakes is 5 minutes of barely-fun gameplay, offering nothing original yet the developers found the time to design 50 odd cars & stick a price tag on them.

The free to play mobile market is a disease & rather than stand against the tide of shit running towards us all, Faily Brakes just adds to the mess.