Since Minecraft became widespread, many indie game developers have started using voxel art for their games; even those that are different from Minecraft itself. One of those games is Blocky Highway: a fun car racing game made by British game development team DogByte Games. DogByte is a team of six members who have already made a few similar games that you can download for free on mobile.

GRAPHICS 8/10

As I mentioned, this game uses voxel art but with single color textures combined with excellent lighting. Everything looks clean and beautiful. Unlike other 3D games where the background art is 2D or lower quality, even the furthest part of the background in Blocky Highway is high-quality 3D. This creates the illusion of a more open-world experience.

SOUND QUALITY 6/10

In Blocky Highway, many vehicles have the same sounding horn; however, other sound effects are good and fit well with in-game actions even though there is not a large variety of them. I have one complaint: there is no music at all, not even in the in-game menu. Even if the developer did not have the budget for music, several sites offer free-to-play music tracks that they could have utilized. It is bizarre to hear only the button selection sound in the in-game menu or just the vehicle engine sound in gameplay.

GAMEPLAY 10/10

The gameplay in Blocky Highway is unique because you need to drive as fast as possible on endless highways while avoiding traffic and collecting points. You can select four different racing tracks: Countryside, Nevada, Snowy, and River. For the River track, you can choose to drive five different boats. For the other routes, you can select between fifty different vehicles. Those fifty vehicles include a large variety, such as motorcycles, cars, vans, trucks, buses, and farming vehicles like a combine harvester, tractor, construction vehicles, or military vehicles. The funniest part is that you can also choose to drive different planes, UFOs, space shuttles, and even a medieval horse chariot or catapult. With that many types of drivable vehicles, this game feels like one with too many installed mods than an official game. However, it is beneficial to have so many choices.

There is something here for everyone.

CHARACTERS 7/10

This being a racing game, there are no characters other than a few visible drivers on boats and motorbikes. They don't move or speak — but this is just a simple voxel game, so we can't expect too much. Also, a funny thing about the NPCs' is that there are many houses and parked vehicles near the road, but no humans, only farm or wild animals. This may be a reference to the good old The Need For Speed (where you can see deer standing near one of the racing tracks — a cool detail from a game made in 1994 because racing games from that period or earlier usually didn't have details near the racing tracks).

STORY 6/10

Every different type of vehicle or group of vehicles in Blocky Highway has its own story: from standard racing cars to taxis, police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, and others. There are even have five different flying vehicles; however, they can still only drive on the road. The most exciting part is boats that change the whole game by requesting to operate on only the river track. Flying vehicles and medieval vehicles also act like cars, but they have unique and funny designs such as cannons, catapults, war chariots, siege towers, and ballistas.

OVERALL 7.4/10

If you like Minecraft and car racing games, then you will enjoy playing Blocky Highway.

It is effortless to play. The fifty-five vehicles available will make you want to play this game for many hours on your mobile device. Also, this game will not waste your data by forcing you to watch annoying ads but you can choose to watch ads and by that earn some coins, however. Watching ads helps the developers to make money so if you use wifi or have a lot of data consider watching these ads so everyone can be happy!