What is the best part of Star Wars Episode 1 The Phantom Menace? If you said Jar Jar Binks or C3PO naked, then I suggest you see the film again, and then if that feeling persists, see a therapist.!

The best part of that movie was the Pod racing. It was a fantastic sequence that captured the essence of Grand Prix racing but notched the speed up tenfold, and placed it in a canyon with more dangerous curves than Natalie Portman. The sequence also spawned a few game licences, namely Star Wars Racer (why didn’t they just call it Pod Racer?) and Star Wars Racer Revenge, which were well received at the time, as they offered the Pod racing experience from the movie on your home computer.

Powerdrome is very similar to Pod Racer, but without the Starwars license. So there are no pods – the vehicles in this are called “Blades”, no Anakin, and thankfully no lame story featuring mitichlorians. In fact, there is no story here at all. The game, unlike so many other racing titles, makes no pretence – this is all about racing at ultrahigh speeds. You aren’t made aware of the universe around you, you are not filled in on the drivers’ relationship with one another, and you’re not even made aware of the reason you’re racing, apart from the desire to become the Powerdrome Champion. On the one hand this is great, as there are no boring cut scenes to watch, no needless filler to bore you to tears, but on the other hand a good story can keep you returning to a game you wouldn’t otherwise think about too much.

As soon as you start the game in Championship mode, you choose your driver and choose your track. There’s only one track and two drivers / Blades to begin with, but you unlock more as you win races. The controls are quite intuitive for a racing title. The right trigger accelerates, the left trigger breaks, and the left joystick steers. Like Pod Racer, there is a boost that builds up the better you race activated by the X button, and a repair button activated by the Y button. Repair is used when you crash into walls and other racers. In an interesting addition, you can choose race manual or automatically, and in typical racing fashion, manual gears can give you an edge if you can use them well enough.

There are no weapons in this game, so winning races is all up to the way you pilot your blade, and the use of your boost and drifting. You can crash into other opponents using a well timed boost and severely injure their chances of winning, but this in turn damages you and can slow you down greatly if not executed properly. The tracks are well laid out, but you won’t find anything too new here if you’re a fan of the genre. Whilst not exactly a Wipeout clone – it is based on a game that came out for Amiga in the late 80s – you can’t help but feel that the tracks are, well, typical for a game of this sort. I also found the tracks to be slightly difficult at first, but there is a time trial option where you can race without having to worry about other competitors, and it is best to race these through a few times to get used to the tracks. However, once used to the tracks, the game is challenging but not unbeatable.

However, the look of the tracks is anything but typical. In fact, the graphics on this title are on par with some of the better racing games available on the Xbox. The feel of speed is accentuated both a camera shake and blur effect. You really feel as though you are going really fast, touching the edges of human and technological endurance, ready to crash and burn at any moment. Yet at the same time the responsiveness of the blade makes you feel like you’ve still got control. Adding to the visual excitement is great lighting. When you emerge from a darkened underground passage, there is an effect as if your eyes are refocussing to the light. As you race across the water the sun glares blindingly. And each world has a distinctive theme, with lots going on in the background. One being a water world, water drops splash onto your windshield. There’s another being a fire based industrial world, and even a pastoral world surrounded by a halo like structure – I kept waiting for the MasterChief to drop in! In the background spaceships zoom overhead and dinosaur like creatures cantor away as you speed by.

Sound is adequately done, with a typical futuristic engine sound of spinning turbines and electronic whirrs. Your opponents curse you as you zoom past, and you curse in return when overtaken, or when you crash. You can use the D-Pad to say a few choice words too. The music is typical of futuristic racers, being mostly ‘techno”, in the loosest sense of the word, but unlike Wipeout, which had artists such as Chemical Brothers, Underworld and Leftfield used as in-game music, this music in Powerdrome is generic and samey throughout the game. And unfortunately, there’s no option to play your own playlists.

The multiplayer aspect of the game comes in the form of splitscreen, which is always a lot of fun, and via system link and Xbox Live! However, every single time I tried to log on to Live! there were no games available. And I’m not the only one who found this, as the Gamespot reviewer had the same issue. Sure, everyone is playing Halo 2, but there must be someone, somewhere out there in the big wide world who is playing this!

Conclusion:
I’ve used the word typical in this review quite a few times, and I think that this is one of Powerdrome’s biggest problems. The game doesn’t take any chances, and delivers a good game that is quite fun. However, there are a lot of games that are quite fun, and this doesn’t improve on the genre at all. I began this review by mentioning Pod Racer, and have also mentioned Wipeout, and basically that’s what this game is – a graphically updated version of those games. If you’re into story like I am, then there’s nothing here to entice you back apart from the thrill of the race. And frankly, that isn’t that great a thrill, especially if you still play the older futuristic racers.

Pros:
No nonsense, intense high speed racing
Excellent graphics, especially the lighting and blur effects

Cons
No one plays it on live
No story to keep you interested
Doesn’t push the envelope for the genre
Generic ‘techno’ music soundtrack

67/100