If you’ve been around GDN for some time you know that we have friends up in Hamburg-based Fish Labs, makers of fine mobile phone games who really have it right. But that doesn’t mean that we give all their games good scores. It just means that we like each other and we like their games, usually.

Rally Master Pro has been around for some time. It’s on Nokia phones, it’s on Sony Ericcson phones, it’s pretty much on every kind of phone there is I think. Now, it’s on the iPhone and it looks better than ever.

I thought this game looked good on the Nokia N81 I have. But if that’s the case then it looks really good on the iPhone. Now that’s not to say that there aren’t jagged edges on some of the graphics or that they are completely amazing, but they’re good.

The sound isn’t so great. They are still flat in all regards, the engine and the crash sounds are simple, there are no ambient sounds (aside from rain hitting the windshield) and the voice of the navigator is almost totally monotone. Plus, he has an annoying tendency of telling you the obvious like ’well, that wasn’t so good’ and ’drive faster,’ not at all what you want from a mate in a Rally race.

There are several things to do in the game including a career with three rally races, time trials to better your speed in certain portions of each rally, a few mini-games and an adrenaline mode. All but the career mode need to be unlocked by playing, of all things, the career mode. Not a bad set of modes for a racing title really.

Now let’s talk about the controls. There are three options which is nice - accelerometer, digital and analog. There is also autogas so you don’t have to worry about accelerating and things can be switched right left. There’s even sensitivity adjustments that can be made. And yet, I still, after hours of playing, testing, changing the controls, never found ones I like. Racing of this nature just doesn’t seem to fit the iPhone. I was constantly under or oversteering depending on my sensitivity setting and the car is nearly impossible to keep on the road.

Now it took an extremely long time for me to even find a usable control scheme using the digital steering mode. Even then it wasn’t perfect and I was still not 100% satisfied with the steering. But overall the game is quite good even if frustrating. I don’t expect all racing games to be hop in and flawlessly drive the car. But I do expect that eventually I’ll get the hang of it. In Rally Master Pro, I never quite felt like that.

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