Reaction: Testing your Patience and Reaction Speed

Before I even begin to comment on this app, who out there thinks that having a game which tests who’s the quickest to react is a good idea? Ok, well if you do then possibly this is the app for you otherwise save your time and look elsewhere as this is definitely not for you.

Reaction is exactly what it suggests, an app that measures how quickly you react to an on screen flash.

Firstly, you can only play against two and five players, so if you fancy testing yourself, the only way to do this is to pretend you are both you and your opponent – which does lead to some interesting results (and being thorough I believe it’s largely down to which hand you write with as to which is the more dominant force in reacting more quickly).
Anyway back to this app…

To begin with you are instructed to press and hold your part of the screen. Once everyone’s done this, the test begins. You get to listen to a fairly irrelevant and distracting rhythm which doesn’t symbolise anything useful like ‘on your marks, get set, go!’ and quite randomly the flash on the screen occurs and once everyone’s let go it will reveal who was fastest, with their corresponding time and so on and so forth.

Now, something that made me think a little, take for example a few kids playing this game all together, the chances are with people letting go of the device as quickly as possible, you can pretty much assure the iPad/iPod/iPhone is going to hit the ground and it could result in some hefty repair bills.

So in all honestly, this is a pretty terrible app and apart from the limited amusement you can have saying that you’re a fraction of a second faster than someone else, this game is highly limited and I can only imagine this being any use as a drinking game! Utterly rubbish!

Positives

• You can test your reaction speed against chums
• It catches you out if you’re trying to cheat and release too early

Negatives

• Why can’t it challenge up to 6 people – there’s enough room!?
• Pretty pointless app – even by current standards
• Could result in broken devices as people let go in the frenzy to be the quickest
• It looks cheap and nasty
• The bleeping countdown – can’t benefit more than one user unless hooked up to speakers