CarX Street... A console racing game in a smartphone

CarX Street is one of the most intriguing mobile games I've had the chance to discover. Despite prioritizing smartphones, its approach to gameplay mechanics is closer to something like The Crew, Forza Horizon, or the traditional Need for Speed games than to Asphalt or NFS No Limits.

We're used to games of this type being released for Android and iOS often offering inferior experiences to their desktop counterparts, with limited gameplay and graphics that, while attractive, provide little room for experimentation, as if we were on rails.

CarX Street, on the other hand, is characterized by being much more robust, offering an open world with multiplayer options and the ability to tackle each challenge at our own pace—a far cry from the guided nature typical of mobile gaming.

Is this good or bad? On the one hand, this gameplay style makes the limitations of a touchscreen more apparent, something particularly noticeable when performing complex drifting maneuvers or overtaking maneuvers mid-race. But it's also a breath of fresh air in an industry that seems determined to hold our hand, limiting our progress and forcing us to complete each objective in the order they dictate.

Surprisingly, it's very well optimized, as at first glance it could easily pass for a racing game for next-gen consoles, especially if we have the opportunity to run it on a mid-range or high-end phone.

In my case, a Redmi Note 13 Pro+ (which I'd barely qualify as mid-range) runs the game without problems, although I had to make a couple of adjustments to the resolution and draw distance to improve the framerate. It's also appreciated to have options to modify performance without having to resort to third-party applications; as I said before, it's a fairly robust game.

In fact, after doing some research, I discovered that there's a whole franchise behind it, with titles like CarX Highway Racing, CarX Drift Racing, and Rally, which use the same game engine to explore other forms of driving.

This series of games is unlikely to reach the level of something like Asphalt or Real Racing, however, for now they're on the right track. CarX Street is a solid starting point that can easily provide several hours of fun.