Escape Road High Score Guide: Reading the Road and Shaking the Police

A first run in Escape Road usually ends the same way: a steer key held through a corner, the car still turning, a tower, a score in the twenties. Getting into the hundreds is mostly about unlearning the hold and looking further up the screen.

1. Steer where the road will be, not where the car is

The camera is high and tilted, so you can see three or four blocks ahead. The car needs about a block of road to change lanes cleanly at full speed. If you react to a bus when it is level with your bumper you are already too late; if you tapped when it appeared at the top of the screen, you were past it before it mattered. Keep your eyes on the top third of the screen.

2. Tap, then check

Every steer should be a tap followed by a look. A tap moves the car about a lane and settles it. If that was not enough, tap again. A held key is only for a deliberate ninety-degree turn at a junction, and even then you release the moment the nose points down the new road.

3. Get off the road when the road is full

Escape Road lets you drive across almost everything that is not a building: lawns, parking lots, the taxi depot, the space between towers. Traffic and police stick mostly to the asphalt. When a road block appears across an avenue, the answer is not to thread the gap between two cruisers — it is to cut across the grass on either side and rejoin the road a block later.

4. Make the police corner

Squad cars accelerate faster than the starter car on a straight, so a long straight run is where they catch you. Every time you turn, the pursuit has to turn as well, and it takes the corner worse than you do. A right, then a left, then a right through a block of towers loses one or two cars nearly every time, and a car that clips a tanker is out of the chase for good.

5. Spend cash on speed

Cash carries over between runs, so the first upgrade matters. The higher-tier garage cars are faster off the line and hold a lead the starting car cannot; a common car simply gets run down once three or four cruisers are on it. Between a car you like the look of and one with a speed or cash perk, take the perk; an oil-dropping car is the best score-run pick, because a cruiser that spins out behind you is one fewer badge.

6. Restart fast, run often

A run is short and the restart is instant, so treat each one as practice for a specific skill: one run only tapping, one run only on the grass, one run where the goal is to have three badges behind you without touching a wall. Five focused runs teach more than twenty panicked ones, and the leaderboard's today tab resets daily.

What a 300+ run looks like

It has almost no straight sections longer than two blocks. It stays near the middle of the map where the towers give you corners to use, rather than the outer highway where there is nowhere to break the line. It grabs cash only when the bundle is already in the lane. And it ends, eventually, to a tank — which is the sign that you played it right.