Tag Archives: Racing

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Need For Speed (2015)

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As someone who doesn’t drive nor own a car in real life, I feel like I’m probably missing something when I play most driving games. I certainly don’t get into the whole tweak this setting to make the car run at 1 horse power over its registered limit so the car goes 3 km/h faster than it normally would. I don’t get making the car look like it’s been thrown up on by an artist with a fetish for plastic airplane wings. What I do like is the sound of the engine and the feel of speed generated by the game. If there is a cop car chase and a cool soundtrack thrown in, then I’m happy.

So I should be delighted with the new Need For Speed. After taking a year off to develop for the new consoles, the Ghost crew working with the Frostbyte Engine have put together a really nice looking game. It’s quite possibly one of the nicest looking games I’ve played in this generation. The environments you drive around are beautiful, although most of the time you’re travelling too fast to notice. The only disappointment is you’re always driving at night. There is a moment where the sky brightens as if it’s going to be dawn, and then dawn never comes, but it’s still beautiful.

The cars themselves are spectacular. There are moments when the FMV cuts from the actors to your car, and it’s near impossible to tell the car is rendered in 3D and not actually there on set. And sound wise, this game pushes all my buttons. The cars sound as good as they look, with the V8s being particularly growly. The music is a cool blend of EDM, newer DnB and some rock, and thankfully not a dubstep track in earshot.

“Wait!?” I hear you cry. “Did you say FMV?” Yes, yes I did. And yes, I mean Full Motion Video, like Night Trap and Mad Dog Mcree, games that came out on Arcade or CD Rom in the early 1990s. And no, this isn’t any better 25 years later. Well, ok, that’s not very fair – they certainly look better as the 3D integration between the actors and non-physical assets is now seamless. This would have been completely shot on green screen, and much like modern movies, it is near impossible to tell what’s real and what’s rendered.

The actors do a valiant job, talking into the camera at “you”, but it feels very amateurish. The script is nonsensical and doesn’t actually contain any coherent story, which means any connection between you and these actors is difficult to form and maintain. There is no plot, no usual story elements, no “bad guys” to battle against. There’s this crew of misfit road racers, and you decide to drive around with them, and there’s kind of a love triangle or hexagon that’s hinted at, and then you meet someone’s idol (who is apparently a real life racing identity – who knew? *shrug*) and race with them, and that’s kind of it. Oh, and fist bumping. So much fist bumping. Every time there is a new scene, there is a fist bump. Every time someone leaves a scene, there is a fist bump. This game should have been called “Need for Fist Bump”.

It seriously baffles me why they decided to go with FMV. I imagine, however, the conversation went a little like this:
Mike: (Management Type Dude) “Holy Fuck, we forgot to include a story! We have Monster product placement but forgot to write a goddamn story for that product placement! John, run out and make some people and scenes for us! Dan, write a story”
Dan: (Lead Designer who once studied English/Journalism) “My job is try to make games fun, not write the story. I don’t know anything about the underground racer scene. I haven’t even seen “Fast and Furious”!
Mike: “It doesn’t need to be War and Peace, Dan, it’s a game about driving fucking fast cars at night. Just copy the F&F synopsis online, but take out the sex and violence… this game needs to be PG. Write it now or we’ll put you back on the match 4 mobile games team.”
Mike: “And put fist bumps in it. Kids love the fist bump.”
John: (Lead Art Producer Type dude) “Mike, we make cars, not people, and you’ve promised another 150 cars for DLC. We don’t have the time nor the team. But we are working with EA, so go get an animation team from another studio to help out.”
Mike: “Shit, we don’t have any animators free – everyone is tied up making Madden 16, Sims 4 and FIFA 16 – it has women in it now you know! Remember what Activision said… it’s TRUE!!”
John: “Damn the FIFA team. Well, shit, I don’t know, get some voice actors or something, and some real car dudes, but we’ll film them on green screen.”
Mike: “Fantastic idea! You’re promoted to Studio Head! Fist bump?”

The driving itself is rather fun, which is good, because at the end of the day, this a driving game, not a fist bump simulator. But let’s get something out of the way first – Need For Speed is an arcade racer. The driving is ‘loose’ and ‘unrealistic’. Your car will slip and slide and turn and do things it probably wouldn’t do in real life or in other car games. It’s meant to be that way and is not, and hopefully never will be, a simulator. Having said this, overall there is a little unresponsiveness when turning that is apparent in all cars. It feels like there is a lag between moving the joystick and the car reacting, and it’s not fixed through tuning the car. It is, however, a minor annoyance that will become less noticeable as you play the game.

Similar to other Need For Speed games, you rack up points when driving, and need these points to pass missions and unlock levels to upgrade your cars. There are a variety of skills which you can score against when driving: Speed, Style, Crew, Build, and Outlaw. Speed is self-explanatory – pull off speed tricks like 0-100 and maintaining your top speed. Style is maintaining good driving lines and drifts around corners. Crew is earned when you drive in concert with your AI opponents, like chain a drift around corners. Build is based on your build, and it’s suitability to the type of race and manoeuvres you pull off. Outlaw is about causing destruction and how long cops will chase you. I really like this system, as it’s fairer to drivers like myself who aren’t always the best drivers, but do enjoy silly things like knocking down street signs.

Points aren’t the only currency to earn in races though. You also earn cash, which is used to purchase new parts or new cars once they’re unlocked by points. It’s important to own at least two cars and get them early, upgrading and tuning them to different specs – one as a drifter to help you slip and slide around corners, and one built for pure speed. I initially wanted to “save” money by only having one car and modding it, but you end up spending more money on tuning and retuning rather than just having two different cars, and there are races which simply cannot be won with the wrong specced car.

The world you inhabit is Ventura Bay, which is apparently based on Los Angeles. I’ve never been to LA, so can’t compare. It does feel very similar to Los Santos though. It’s an always online world, much like Burnout: Paradise City, and you’ll see other players driving about, usually on the map or parked at the garage. We’ll get to more into that in a moment, but apparently a lot of people were bitching about this when it was announced. I don’t understand why, I’ve never had any issues with connection nor drop outs and only once was my experience negatively impacted, when Xbox decided it was time to update in the middle of a race, but that was ultimately my fault.

The entire map is unlocked at the start of the game, so you can drive around to your hearts content. Driving around earns you points just the same as the missions, and although you can always teleport to the missions, I suggest driving to the missions at first to give you some much needed level advancement. The game story is where you earn cash, and designed around five main characters who will fist bump you in the FMV story scenes to give you missions, corresponding to the five styles of driving. For example, Spike is usually represented by a green icon, which is Speed, so most of his missions will be races. Yellow represents Style races. Purple is Build races, so usually you need a specific type of car or motor or mod. Blue is Crew, so these always involve racing in teams, and Red is Outlaw, so usually mean racing causing destruction or with cops chasing you. The characters sometimes shift in what they want you to do, so there’s plenty of variety in the story missions.

Some missions you need to come first in either the race or by amount of points earned, whilst some are there just to further the story and placement doesn’t matter. The ones where you have to earn the highest points are usually quite fun, because it’s all about how well you drive. You make more points drifting in a pack than alone and feel more inclined to take unusual risks, like jump ramps, drive into on-coming traffic, and hand break turns.

The races where you have to win outright are downright annoying, because the rubber banding is extreme. You can be winning by a huge lead and then slow down to avoid a collision, and then be overtaken by not only the second place, but third and fourth. It’s controller throwing frustrating. There’s one race in particular which I’ve found impossible to win, and looking online I’m not the only one. Another annoyance is the other road traffic. There’s not much on the road, which is good, because it’s moronic. It deliberately veers into you and it also glitches – it can appear one moment and disappear the next, meaning you can swerve to miss something which is essentially not there.

I mentioned cop car chases, and they’re quite annoying too. As you break more laws, you rack up a higher fine which you pay on getting caught. The cops will set up road blocks and so on to stop you, which you can normally get away from, until they drop tire spikes, meaning you lose speed and control if you run over them. In free mode, this is fine, because you normally don’t spend a lot of time near the cops to warrant tire spikes, and the cops are stupidly easy to get away from. However, during an Outlaw race, where you have to do the race whilst being chased and rack up lots of Outlaw points, the degree of Outlaw-ness continues after the race. So whilst it’s rare to get tire spikes dropped during the race, after the race when you want to go to the next mission or whatever, there are tire spikes everywhere and you will lose any cash you earned from the race in fines.

I’ve only done one race in multiplayer, and the player took the first turn and glitched out, taking the opponents out with him. I was incredibly grateful to that player, as it was the race I have not won yet… however the extreme rubber banding meant the AI cars came and overtook me at the last corner. If you’re in a story mode race and haven’t opted to race with another player, you appear on the map to them, but you can’t see them. So on the map you’ll see what is clearly a race with the little arrows going around a course, but if you’re in the locality won’t see any cars or players. I guess this is to stop players trolling each other and parking cars along the route, but it’s very odd situation and creates a lack of cohesion between single and multiplayer. If you’re going to do this, why not make a single player and multi-player version of the maps, and allow one to be offline?

Conclusion:
Need For Speed lost its footing some time ago, and is still trying to find it. Whilst the game looks and sounds amazing, and the driving is fun for the most part, there were a lot of odd decisions made with this one – the FMV, the Always Online, Driving at Night, No Weather – which would have been expensive in terms of time and money but don’t really add any value to the game. My advice for the developers is to scale back the game, focus on what made Need For Speed so good back in the day, and forget trying to shoehorn in this and that to appease the masses.

Pros:
Amazing looking game
Great car sounds and good soundtrack.
The points system is far fairer than other driving games
Good variety in types of races / missions

Cons:
Car turning is a little unresponsive / sticky.
Rubber banding is ridiculous
Glitches of cars vanishing
Glitches in multiplayer races

60/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Trials Evolution

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Three years ago Trials HD, the motorcross physics puzzler platformer, snuck onto the XBLA market alongside heavy hitters ‘Splosion Man and Shadow Complex, but because of its simple yet quality gameplay coupled with tremendous amount of fun, it demanded attention. Xbox World gave it 90/100, one of the highest scores for an arcade game at the time, and fortunately for us the praise the game got then is still very relevant for its sequel, Trails Evolution.

It still has the “easy to pick up but hard to master” quality, and has that steep learning curve, but it’s not one that can’t be overcome with practice and determination. The checkpoint system is still wonderful, and the handling of the bike is superb. However, where it differs is it takes the great stuff of the original game and makes it more social.

This time they’ve refined the feel of the bike’s physics, so the already tight controls are tighter. There is less of the flighty feel of the previous game, and you constantly feel in control of the way the bike and rider will tip and fall. Not only do you scroll from left to right when racing, now the track will curve, and whilst you’re still “on rails” adding this extra dimension increases the enjoyment of the experience. In addition to this, the physics of the track can change. One track in particular moves about under you, so you need to put more acceleration in places for jumps that normally would require little. And there are some simply stunning tracks, with one of my favourites being Limbo, taking the black and white silhouette of indie darling Limbo and making into one of the most nefarious tracks to play.

Social is often a negative word when coupled with traditional or hardcore gaming. And make no mistake – Trails is a hardcore game. It makes you fail and encourages you to get better. It doesn’t hold your hand like so many other games, but will help you up when you fall. The game will teach through repetition, causing you to replay parts over and over. And it will only punish you a little, but give greater simple rewards, whether it’s another funny explosion when you fail, or scream from the rider as he shoots down a ramp, to silver and gold medals after the race.
Throwing the social aspect into this title enhances the experience greatly. There are three aspects to the social which I will call the ladder, the multiplayer, and the track creation. The ladder of the previous game is replaced with a devious and insipid new ghost like feature which shows your Xbox Live friends as dots along the track you’re on. As you race, these dots will be a constant nag at you to do better. They’re unobtrusive, but the best motivator to improve I’ve seen in a game.

When you’re racing along the track and screw up, restart at a checkpoint, and see one of the little white dots with a friend’s name on it wiz past you get a renewed sense of determination. When you see a dot get stuck at a point and you go flying past it, you’ll cackle with glee.
However, cackling with glee becomes a genuine chortle of mirth with multiplayer. Racing in real time with 4 people online or together in a room is laugh out loud funny. There are two modes, one with races on a 4 line track; the other which tests your skills against one another in a ghost-yet-realtime mode on any single player track.

I much prefer the 4 player as although you can’t influence each other, I’m sure the expectation of performing well is far more relevant in this mode. It’s gripping, in that you know one little mistake can cost you the race. It’s incredibly funny watching people stack it on a jump you totally nailed, and being able to play it 4 player offline as well makes it an ideal party game, because merely watching it makes you want to play as well. The Online ghostmode has this competitive feeling to a degree, but even though it does occur in real time it doesn’t bring out the same fervor in people that racing alongside one another does.

The last aspect of the social game is the ability to make your own tracks. The track creator is quite complex to use and would benefit greatly from the use of a mouse and a decent tutorial. Yet the creations already online are brilliant, and like the competitiveness of the racing itself, the quality of the tracks makes you want to do something just as good. After you’ve played a track you get to vote on it, and the best ones show up in weekly showcases. One of the best I played was Shadow Redux, which used the physics of shadows to interact with the real world items for a complex and rewarding ride.

Conclusion:
Trials Evolution is fantastic fun. Its simplicity and beguiling depth encourages replay, and the addition of social functions encourages a competitive streak in even the most placid of players. It’s the perfect sequel to an almost perfect game.

Pros:
Everything that was great about the first title is here.
Refinement of the physics gives a deeper sense of controls.
Great new tracks which will challenge and amuse.
The addition of social features adds competitive fun to the title.

Cons:
Bloody hard to put down! (not really a con)
Music could be better, but it’s better than its predecessor.
95/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Blur

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Bizarre Creations’ Blur is one of those games so simple in its premise you wonder why it hasn’t been done sooner. It’s best described as Project Gotham Racer meets Mario Cart, and takes the best things of all those games and shoves it in one neat little package.

Like Project Gotham Racing, Blur has “real world” locations such as San Francisco, Tokyo, and Barcelona, with fake tracks in each of those cities. The cities look vibrant and real, full of neon lights and flowing banners and glass towers and trees and dirt on the off-road tracks. Also similar to PGR, it has fantastic looking licensed cars from Ferrari, Lotus, Ford, Volkswagon, Landrover and more. As you zoom about the race tracks, you take damage from other racers and crashing into walls and such, and the more you get hit and smashed, the more damaged your car looks. But that’s where the realism stops and the fun starts.

The object of single player is nothing new to racing game enthusiasts. Race to win and collect “lights” for first, second and third place. The more lights you have, the more events you unlock in each division. Each division is owned by a particular racer with a particular car and mod, but more on that in a moment.

There are also bonus lights to pick up via two means – Fan Runs and Fan Targets. Driving through a gate icon found on every track opens up the Fan Runs where you must race through slalom style to get more fans. Fans are otherwise rewarded for clever driving and using pickups on other racers. Fan Targets are how many fans you must win to unlock a light. Fans are the currency of Blur, and by winning fans you unlock different cars and mods. It’s similar to Kudos found in PGR. As you do certain manoeuvres, you’re rewarded points. However, unlike PGR there is more to it than simply slick driving.

Like Mario Cart, there are pickups on the track at various locations. These come in the form of offensive and defensive, and cause all kinds of mayhem when racing about. The offensive pickups come in the form of mine, barge, shunt, bolt, and shock. Mines can be shot forward or backwards, and remain on the track until someone hits them with their car or another weapon. Barge pushes the cars around you away from you. Shunt is a homing beacon, which whirls into the car targeted in front of you, ala the red shell in Mario Cart. Bolt is like the green shell, a “dumb” forward or reverse firing missile which is devastating if you manage to get 3 hits in a row with it. Shock shoots columns of lightning into the front runners path, causing mass destruction. Defence involves shield, repair and nitro. Shield protects your car from other effects. Repair repairs damage, and nitro boosts you at speed.

However, to view the pickups so simplistically won’t win you many fans. All pickups can be used offensively or defensively in the right situation. Use shield and nitro to ram into other cars. Fire nitro forward to “air break”, allowing you to avoid collisions and then speed out of danger. Deploy mines, barge and bolts to destroy shunts and mines. Your score will rise even higher due to the fan multiplier when you’re driving well and use the pickups in combination, such as drifting around corners and bolting cars. There are also Fan Favourites, which give you a time limit to perform a certain manoeuvre such as nitro slam another car, or drift well around a corner.

There are nine different divisions in single player, and to be eligible to race the owner of the division in a One on One Race to own their car, you have to do more than just race. For example, in the Fan Favourite division you must complete 5 Fan Demands, Complete 2 Fan Runs, Complete 4 Fan Targets and Win Event 5 with one x5 Fan Combo. Once you defeat them, you unlock their car and their mod. Mods do a range of things, such as increase the number of bolts you can fire, and armour plating.

There are 3 varieties of races other than One on One – Checkpoint, Race, and Destruction. Checkpoint is a timed race, with stopwatch and nitro pickups only. Race is a regular blur race against 10 or 20 other cars, whilst Destruction arms you with bolts only and places cars in front of you to destroy. Each car destroyed add more time to your race. Whilst on paper this seems like not a lot of variety, the fast paced nature of the game means you never get bored.

Single player, whist quite difficult and a little shallow compared to other racing games, is still loads of fun. Bizarre Creations have recognised this to some extent, and allowed the creation of challenges between friends. Just amassed an enormous amount of fans? Set up a Nemesis on the leaderboard and challenge your friends to beat you. Got all the lights on expert? Send a message to facebook or twitter to brag about it. It seems worthless at first, but seeing your friends beat your hard work with what appears to be ease spurs even the least competitive person to try the race again, and this simple yet effective method of creating depth has worked.

But even so, racing multiplayer is where the game truly shines. Four player split screen will fill a room with the same laughter and entertainment as Mario Cart once did, and even the best driver can be taken down by a well placed mine right on the finishing line, meaning it’s accessible to everyone.

In Online Multiplayer there are different race modes, including racing with no mods which is rather boring to be honest; Team Racing which makes the game feel like Midtown Madness but with power ups; to a smash up derby arena fight which is quite possibly the best thing since Destruction Derby on the original Playstation. Furthermore, Fans and Mods are slightly different. Taking a leaf out of Modern Warfare’s book, Fans act as experience points and Mods act as outfits. As per single player fans unlock cars and events as you go up fan levels, but you’re only racing for fans, not lights.

Mods are different from single player as there are more of them and they have more effects, such as converting shield hits to power ups, and causing mines to explode into 4 mini mines, and defensive stuff like make your car harder to home in on. You can assign 3 mods to a car, and you have 4 mod groups to customise and apply to your car, so like the weapon kits in MW you can find the mods which suit your play style best.

There are also car and rank challenges, again which improve your car and are rewarded by playing the game online. This adds enormous depth to the multiplayer game, especially in team games where users will complement each other with some equipping their cars to win the race, and others equipping to take battle to the other team.

Conclusion:
The fun of Blur is unparalleled in any other driving game. It could have been simply Mario Cart in real looking cars, but Bizarre Creations have looked hard at what is fun about racing games, what is fun about competitive play, what is fun about online gaming, and worked out how to get all of that in one game and more importantly, get it to work well and remain fun.

Pros:
Looks awesome
Simple yet fantastic take on a motor racing game
Incredibly fun to play split screen
Quite some depth to the multiplayer
Cool use of social networking tools

Cons:
Single player is quite difficult
Can’t race split screen online

90/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Need For Speed: Shift

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The Need For Speed franchise has had its ups and downs over the last few years. Some people enjoyed games like Hot Pursuit and Undercover but others felt the whole cops and robbers thing was a little dull and uninspired. Need For Speed: Shift (NFSS) attempts to change direction and bring track racing back to the world of NFS. It does an admirable job of it, but with a whole heap of other racing game franchises competing for your dollar at the moment, does it enough to distinguish itself from the pack?

When you start NFSS you have a practice race which tests your driving ability and then sets the games difficulty based on how well you drove. There are options such as assisted cornering, showing the race line, automatic gears changes amongst others which will give people of all different skill levels easy access into the game. This is a great way to introduce the game to the player without using a silly tutorial and allows you to get used to the controls and pace of the game.

Like so many other racing games, the set up is you’re a career driver, and you have to earn points and money to be able to compete in the later tiers of racing. You begin with a modest amount of money with which you purchase a modest car in which you race against other modest cars. However, after a few races, you’ll start getting invites to other types of races, where you can race not so modest cars. This breaks up the monotony of the early driving quite nicely.

Winning a race isn’t the be all and end all of this game. When you race, you’re rewarded points for how you are driving, similar to the Kudos system in Project Gotham Racing. However, unlike Kudos, you get rewarded points for precision as well as aggressive driving. Precision driving points are awarded for overtaking cleanly, following the correct drivers line and taking corners well. Aggressive driving points are rewarded for knocking bumpers, drifting, hitting on overtaking, and spinning opponent cars off the track.

I really liked this system. It rewards you for driving how you want to drive. If you want to nudge every car off the track whilst risking your own, then you’re rewarded for it. If you want to get out in front early and do a clean lap, then you’re rewarded for it. You’re never punished for doing something, nor is the points system designed to punish you for driving one way or the other.

Reaching the podium lands you a certain number of stars, and reaching a certain amount of points also nets you some stars, and also completing bonus objectives, such as spinning out 4 opponents, or completing a clean lap, will gain you a star. The amount of stars you have determines how much money you earn, and also unlock higher tiers.

There is an incredible amount of variety once you open a few more tiers. There’s one on one drag type races, supercar races, time trials, endurance races, regular 1, 2 or 3 lap races and much, much more. The game doesn’t feel like an out and out simulation, but it’s not too arcadey either. It’s a nice blend of the two, and the difficulty levels help you refine your preference better. The difficulty of the actual races is a little off, however. There are some races where you can blitz the field and get all the stars, and other races in the same tier, even in the same categories, that are ridiculously hard to come out on top. You might still win, but you’ll have trouble getting all the stars, or conversely, you might get all the bonuses, and not reach the podium.

But the biggest downfall of the game is the drifting. Oh boy, does it suck. When racing in a normal race, you can drift around corners fine, and it feels like it should. In the drifting races, there’s a whole new HUD meter which isn’t really explained, and a whole different feel to the car. It’s like someone has reversed the oversteer settings, and instead of flowing naturally around the corners, you wrestle with the controls and spin out, or don’t spin at all. Luckily, there is enough racing in the game to get points to unlock tiers for you to avoid it altogether.

The game carries its Driving Level onto online races, and will match you with races of your level, and racing in online races will also improve your driving level. It’s really quite clever, as it makes the modes of the game seem cohesive. Races I drove in were all but lag free, but I was driving against Australians in the middle of the day. Also, I’ve had a few races online, none which I came first in, but it’s showing up as only 1 win in my driver profile.

Graphically the game is great and the in car view has to be seen to be believed. The motion of the driver, the look of the different car dashboards, to the way the side blurs as you gain momentum forcing you to concentrate on the road ahead is truly fantastic. It’s one of the few games where I want to only race in the in car view! Another great effect is when you crash the screen jumps and distorts, not unlike Burnout (with the smashes in the replay also pay a nod to the burnout franchise).

Conclusion:
Need For Speed: Shift is a welcome entry into the world of track racing and a step back in the right direction for the series. The biggest problem is the game doesn’t do too much to distinguish itself from the other excellent racing games available lately. Everyone already has their favourites – some like V8 Supercars, some like Forza, others like Gran Turismo and NFSS comes at a time when people may be unlikely to change back to the series.

On the other hand, the Need For Speed fan may be put off by the return to fixed maps, traditional car racing and no free roaming. But there is some damn good fun to be had with this game, and whilst I’m aware people only have so much time and budget to play games, racing fans may be doing themselves a disservice if they miss out on this.

Pros
awesome in car camera
incredible amount of racing
great points system

Cons
too much like every other racing game
the drifting is a total failure

83/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Powerdrome

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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

Review, Video Games, XboxWorld

Speed Kings

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As I don’t like racing games that much, so I may just be the perfect reviewer for them, as I have no preconceived notions on how racing games should feel. This game sits somewhat uncomfortably for me, sitting between being an “arcade” and a “simulation” style racer, with out being one or the other, causing this reviewer to become a little frustrated with a game that has quite a lot of potential as a new “illegal street bike racing” game.

The game has a number of modes in both single player and multi-player, but it’s best to learn how to play the game by attempting to get your license. The license mode sees you attempting a number of moves and tricks in a certain time limit to get a ranking of gold, silver or bronze. I got bronze, and never tried again, so I am not sure what, if anything, you get for higher, apart from the knowledge you know how to handle your bike well.

The moves and tricks you learn are detailed in the book, but it’s good to practice them in this mode to get a real feel for the games mechanics and the motorbikes’ handling. And handling takes some getting used to, as there is a heap of buttons to learn and remember. The initial configuration of the controller is a little funny to other racing games – A is the throttle, X is the front break, B is kick/punch, Y is powerdown, and white is powerband. The left trigger is trick, while the right trigger is rear break/skid. The alternative is a little more familiar, with the left trigger as powerband, the right trigger is throttle, A is the trick, X is the rear break, B is kick/punch, Y is rear break/skid, and white is powerdown. And this is my first complaint about the game – I wish you could map your own button configuration to the controller because I like using the trigger as a throttle, so used the second configuration, but even then I was constantly looking at the controller to press the right buttons.

Now, you’re probably wondering what the hell “powerband” and “powerdown” are. They’re just fancy terms for “turbo” and “power slide’, respectively. As you race, fight, dodge cars, and perform tricks, you build up your powerband gauge, and once it’s full you can use your powerband to turbo away from the other riders. Powerdown is used when trees and poles fall in, or semi-trailers cross, your path, and you need to slide under them to miss crashing into them. Usually the word “powerdown” will flash on screen, and a flashing arrow will appear above the obstacle, and generally if you hit the button immediately, you’ll avoid the object by sliding under it. I say usually, because on a few occasions I’ve done it at EXACTLY the right time, and slid but popped up before the obstacle, and crashed into it. This could have been my bad timing, if only my friend hadn’t been playing at the time, and did the exact same thing in the same place.

In both Single and Multi player games you have the option to do a Single Race, a Meet, a Time Attack Race, a Trick Attack Race and playing Head To Head. Single Race is just that; a single race on your chosen track with computer controlled players, and a friend in multiplayer. The Meet mode is the meat of the game, where you race on three different circuits to unlock the next circuit. Finish all Meets and you unlock two options for ALL game modes, Mirrored Tracks and Traffic. Mirrored tracks option allows you to reverse the track direction, and Traffic allows you to turn off the traffic. Time Attack is just you versus the clock; no other traffic, no other riders. Trick Attack is where you have to perform various tricks within a certain time limit, and head to head is you up against one other rider, either computer controlled or against another human.

If that’s not enough to keep you busy, once you get the best times for ALL races available, thus unlocking extra bikes, you also unlock Grand prix mode. In single player you race against other riders, and it’s the only multiplayer mode where you can have four players. I must admit I never got this far, so reluctantly I can’t tell you if it’s on new tracks or not. Furthermore, on each race, there are respect challenges. Respect is earned by performing various tricks, like “8 powerbands” or “kick 4 riders” or “handstand for 150 meters”. These can be attempted in Single Race mode as well as Meet mode, and unlock even more bikes and extras.

With all these modes and unlockables, how could you possibly become bored with the game! Well, maybe it’s just me, but the controls really put me off. There’s just too many to think about. To do a trick like a handstand, you need to hold throttle, kick and trick, as well as steer. Trying to get to each checkpoint with the clock ticking down, other riders trying to knock you off the bike, on coming traffic as well as traffic that comes from the side and behind while you try to remain in first place for the finish line is already enough to worry about, let alone doing a powerdown to avoid a tree that’s fallen down, and performing tricks to keep your powerband meter up so you can turbo. It gets even worse when it’s raining or snowing, as the roads become really slippery and you lose control on every corner. Then, on top of that, there’s police, who if they catch you take a whopping 5 seconds off your time! Luckily, the AI isn’t very smart, or perhaps it’s very smart and has the same difficulty in playing the game, as the computer-controlled riders seem to crash as often as I did. This made the game a little more fair and less frustrating than it could have been.

Graphically the game is excellent. The sun glare on some roads is frighteningly blinding in some cases, while the rain and snow on other tracks looks real, with water spraying across the road as you skid out around a corner. The weather has a real physical effect on the bikes too, which is good too, although at other times the physics is a little over exaggerated. For example, sometimes you can get crazy air going over jumps. The sense of extreme speed is well represented, especially with powerband. The tracks are all very bright and colourful, reminding me of SSX with all the flashing and what have you, and the amount of bikes in terms of style, colour and rider uniform is also superb. Crashing looks cool, which is good because you’re going to be doing it a lot in this game. Sound wise it’s not too bad, standard motorbike sounds alongside standard traffic sound, but there’s no option to use your own soundtrack, so you’ll have to put up with the games’ idea of a “adrenalin pumping” techno-rock soundtrack, which get tired after a while.

Speed Kings is not a bad game; it’s a solid attempt at creating something a bit different from your run of the mill racing bike game. Maybe it packs too much in, tries to be a jack-of-all-trades in terms of whether it’s an arcade or a simulation type game, and thus doesn’t excel in either field. But it is a lot of fun, gives a good sense of the “speed” and “danger” of illegal street racing, and has a lot of different modes and unlockables that will keep you playing for a while if you can get over the frustrating controls.

Pros:

Very colourful tracks.
Lots of modes and unlockables.
Gives a good sense of the “speed” and “danger” of illegal street racing.
Great fun if/when you get the hang of controls.

Cons:

Too many functions on the controller and can’t map them to suit your style.
No custom sound track, No System Link and No Live support
Doesn’t know if it’s an arcade or simulation style racer.

Score: 75/100