Apple Arcade: Speed Demons is a bit of a classic - and it plays like Burnout
Sparks will fly.
Speed Demons looks like Spy Hunter and plays like Burnout, and it's by App Store royalty. Is it good? Reader, it is wonderful.
So it's top-down racing at extreme speeds and with a laissez faire policy about knocking enemies through barriers. Skipping past the alarmingly dense menu, you'll find yourself on an endlessly curving mega-highway, sending out golden Burnout sparks when you grind against anything and nosing your way through a range of events - races, checkpoint runs, pursuits, rampages - that ask you to balance speed and aggression. Move left, move right, brake suddenly to upset the people behind you - this is both simple and overwhelming, in the best sense of both words.
Physics lies at the heart of what makes it fun, I think. It's great to weave through traffic, but it's even better when your mistakes cause a container truck to slowly yawn over on one side, sending the cars around you scattering. It is lovely to nail a precision takedown, but it's also pretty nice to learn that you've caused so much mayhem that another takedown has been registered off-screen.
This is all the work of Radiangames, the one-person studio behind quietly ingenious smartphone classics like Inferno and Slydris. His past stuff is slowly making its way onto consoles, which is fantastic news, but it's even better to see him on Apple Arcade with a racer of such quality. Download this. It is ace.