Enjoyable Horse Racing

'Enjoyable' is loose terminology

Reviewed by Shawn from afro-ninja.com

Enjoyable Horse Racing is a betting sim in which you choose your horses and track, and bet on which one will come in first. It’s not a bad idea, and it has some nice features, but it’s really just not that fun.

Starting out you have a selection of six horses and two tracks. You choose a track for them to race on, decide how many horses will be racing, then guess their finish places. The horses involved in each race are a random set of the ones you have unlocked. Bet correctly to increase your money and rankings, and unlock new horses. You can take out a bank loan if you’re in debt, and the game tracks various stats for you like races won, play time, largest amount of money, streaks, ratios, etc. Each horse has its own stats (max speed, min speed, guts) and despite the betting there is a little bit of strategy involved. Horses with high top speed and guts will do better on short tracks, and horses with higher min speed will do better on long tracks. You can also cheer your horse on by pressing the appropriate arrow keys when lit up, although I didn’t notice too much of an impact. In one race I ignored the arrow keys altogether and my horse won by a landslide, mainly because it had the favorable stats.

The big problem here is that there’s not much to draw you into the game. The graphics are pretty average, especially the tracks themselves. They just consist of one background repeated over and over. The horse running animation is nice, though I suspect it was just traced. When you earn money you can buy a few new tracks, but why use new tracks when you can race the same ones? From what I could tell there is no difference in the money you earn from track to track, just how well you rank the horses. And you can unlock new horses to use, but since their placement is randomized you can’t really use them where/when you want to. A career mode type of approach to this game could have been really cool, where you buy the horses that you want to race and take care of them. Rewards would feel like they actually belong to you, instead of just adding stuff you can’t directly use.

The soundtrack is pretty good for the game but there are some audio problems. When you start a race the menu music and race music tend to overlap, and when you finish the race the menu music doesn’t start back up until you select a new menu option. Nothing major, just a little bit of sloppy programming. Presentation-wise the menu is set up nice and is understandable, but the in-game instructions don’t cover how the horse stats really work. Enjoyable Horse Racing wasn’t terribly enjoyable for me, but if you like betting then this offers a nice set of options and records to please your gambling fancy.

Click here to play Enjoyable Horse Racing






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