Anki Drive, the artificial intelligence-assisted toy car game that debuted last fall, is back with new cars, new tracks, and new ways to play.
The game first gained recognition at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference last year and launched with a handful of AI-controlled toy race cars and a single track. It's a bit like slot cars, but smarter. Each car has a distinct personality and racing capabilities that differ from the others. Paired with the accompanying Anki Drive iOS app, you can battle friends who are also controlling a car through the app, or opponents who navigate the course using artificial intelligence algorithms. As you play and get more experience, your vehicle evolves, gaining valuable weapons and abilities you can use to beat other players.
"There's this notion in consumer products and toys that you buy something and that's what you'll have forever," Anki co-founder Hanns Tappeiner said. "But that doesn't have to be true if you can use software to redefine what a product is and how it works."
Starting today, the Anki Drive app is getting a new type of play: race mode. Before, your option with other players was Battle mode, in which the goal was to shoot other cars off the track with virtual weapons. Now, you can set a number of laps (15, 30, or 45), and the first to cross the finish line wins the game. In my demo of the game, 15 laps went by in a snap, equating to less than 5 minutes of gameplay. Of course, there's more than just racing strategy involved, as you and the other cars on the course still have weapons like a "rail gun" or "tractor beam" you can use to foil competitors.
The addition of two new tracks also complicates the racing strategy. The first, Crossroads, features an intersection in the course where cars could crash if they don't time the crossing correctly. "The AI cars may shoot you off the road or hit you on purpose to get you off the road. It's fun chaos," Tappeiner says.
The second, Bottleneck, requires you to strategically position yourself to get ahead on narrower portions of the track. Tappeiner says figuring out where to be on the road becomes the most challenging aspect of this course.
The new courses are joined by two new cars as well: Corax, an offensive tank of a car (which can operate two weapons at one time instead of just one), and Hadion, the fastest of Anki's six available cars.
The new cars retail at $69 and are available today through Anki's website, while the new tracks run $99 and will ship May 6.
