It's both inspiring and depressing at the same time you know. Firstly that developers have finally cracked the balance between free and freemium, secondly that freemium is still a 'thing' - after all, I'm still old-school enough to believe that people would rather try a demo and then buy the whole game for a nominal sum, for playing forever. But what do I know? The market clearly wants to go in the other direction.
In any case, Offroad Racing 2 is by no means the worst offender in the freemium world. In fact, as I say, it's rather well balanced, in that you can have fun for free, but a dollar zaps the ads and another couple (or, say £2) get you enough in-game currency to make progress a lot faster and smoother.
As you'll probably have guessed, the idea here is to guide a succession of large four-wheel drive trucks over level after level of subtly different 2D landscapes. The slopes get more and more treacherous and the idea is that, in addition to skill and timing, you'll also need to keep upgrading your vehicle's attributes, in order to cope.
The gameplay's responsive, as you'd hope, with just two controls - accelerator pedal and brake - and you'll need both in order to make some of the slopes. The graphics are clear and cartoon-y - or, if you will, arcade-like, a feeling backed up by the need to collect coins as you drive. Don't worry, it's all fast and fun and each level only takes about a minute to complete.
Get things wrong, of course - for example rolling the car over - and it's level over too, so you have to start it again. Some of the slopes need quite a run up and a flying leap in order to manage, and then you have to slow down once over the ridge, and so on.
The ads are definitely worth paying a dollar (or 79p) to zap, they're very intrusive (e.g. below) and are always getting in the way. The developer has to monetise, of course, so fair play, I guess...
In terms of progressing, any of the coin purchases shown below will give you a lot of car upgrading ability - £2 for 250,000 sounds about right and, added to the ad removal, means that you'll have paid £2.79 (in the UK) for a game which probably has several tens of hours of happy gaming in it. Thought about this way, that's quite reasonable in the grand scheme of things, though the coins aren't transferrable to another Windows Phone, should you upgrade (i.e. there's no cloud sync and the IAPs aren't repeatable, as you'd expect if you were unlocking a 'function', for example)...
A decent little game overall, one that should find happy arcade gamers and also a happy developer, with some monies rolling in. You can find Offroad Racing 2 here in the Windows Phone Store.