Car Chase Game Tips: Circle, Do Not Zigzag

The first car chase game tip is to turn in wide circles instead of zigzagging: in Mesadash, holding one direction scored 40 to 150 points within a minute, while switching direction every second ended every run early with 12 to 30. Even driving straight with no steering did better than the zigzag.

How Mesadash works

Mesadash is a desert car chase seen from above. Your yellow muscle car drives forward on its own, and you turn it left and right with the arrow keys. A pack of raider cars closes in and rams you; rocks and cacti block the way. Cash, repair kits and speed boosts lie on the sand. A red health bar drops with every hit, and when it is empty the game over card shows your score and your record. Cash goes to the shop, where you can buy other cars.

What we measured

We played Mesadash in a test browser at 1280 by 800 pixels with software rendering. A script started a run and held the keys on a fixed pattern for one minute: no keys at all; the left arrow held the whole time, so the car drives in circles; and a zigzag that switched between left and right every second. Four runs each. We read the score from the game over card, or from the score counter for runs that were still going when the minute ended. The script never looked at the sand, so the numbers show what each habit does, not what a careful driver can reach.

12 runs in one test browser, all key presses made by a script on a fixed pattern. The desert and the raiders are not the same in every run, so the spread inside each habit is large.

Circling scored the most

Holding one arrow key turns the car in a steady circle, and that habit put up the biggest numbers: 104 and 150 in runs that ended inside the minute, and 81 in a run that was still going, which had also collected 20 in cash. The score climbed faster than the clock in these runs, so the circling earned points beyond simply surviving.

Zigzagging ends runs early

Switching direction every second felt like the natural way to dodge, and it was the worst habit we tried. All four zigzag runs crashed out before the minute was up, with 12, 30, 26 and 15 points. The car spends its time turning back and forth in the same patch of sand while the raiders catch up.

Straight ahead is not bad

With no keys at all the car drives in a straight line. Two runs ended at 25 and 20, but the other two were still going after a minute at 62 and 61, without picking up any cash. Running away in a straight line keeps the raiders behind you for a while; turning back into them is what costs health.

4 tips that follow from the numbers

• Turn in wide arcs. Circling scored 40 to 150 in our test.
• Do not flick left and right. The zigzag never lasted the minute.
• Use the open sand. A straight run kept two cars alive past a minute.
• Drive through the cash. It pays for faster cars in the shop.

Where to try it

Try it yourself in Mesadash. For more cars and chaos, Smashlane has you smash zombies in a car park, and Dustrider is a 3D motorbike ride on a desert road.