What’s better than a snarling dirtbike, burnin’ rings of fire and a sarcastic stuntman in an Evel Knievel jumpsuit? Exactly — nothing. Add hot 3D graphics, cool audio and some smart, funny writing, and you’ve got an iPhone full of contusion-forming, bone-shattering fun. At least, for a half-hour anyway.
Daredevil Dave: Motorcycle Stuntman! pits you, as Dave, on a tour of danger-filled jumps in 18 cities. The jumps themselves are creatively hazardous, forcing you to jump over choppers with rotating rotor blades and shark-filled tanks, along with more classic stuntman staples like jumping over a line of buses and through rings of — you guessed it — burning fire.
Successfully negotiating the jumps results in huge payouts, messing up means a lot of pain for Dave, and even more painful hospital bill; the trick is to stay afloat by raking in more in prize money than you’ll pay out in medical bills so you can travel to the next jump.
While the controls are ridiculously simple — all you’re really responsible for is setting the ramp angle and length before the jump, then applying enough throttle to hit the correct jump speed — surviving a jump intact is pretty tricky. fortunately, the game lets you practice the next jump (and any you’ve unlocked) *ad nauseam.
And that’s really the problem with the game — there isn’t much in the way of gameplay, and the visceral thrill of watching Dave get eaten by sharks or smacked around the stadium wears off after a short time.
But the sharp-looking 3D graphics, fun ragdoll physics and gore when Dave misses a jump and funny surfer-dude-sounding voice acting makes the game tantalizingly difficult to resist at only a buck (its sale price for an unspecified time); or check out the free version before buying, if you’re really (and we mean, really) short on cash.
Verdict: 3.5/5 – Outstanding 3D graphics, laugh-out-loud-funny voice-acting and a novel idea fractured by repetitive gameplay.
