I don't know what the developers of this game were smoking when they decided on certain aspects to it but whatever it was sure wasn't helping them.
This game is very fun to play. I have been at it probably 10 or more hours now. It is one of the first games I've played in years that I've actually wanted to fully complete the game to 100% simply because it is so much fun. The controls of this game are sublime. Your cars feel heavy and hunker down on the road when at high speed. Get twitchy under breaking and are easy to spin if you are not careful. The game is designed around the idea of drifting. You can easily drift in this game by planting your foot into the accelerator and then tapping the break while turning. This steps the back out and you can drift/powerslide around most corners. The process is easy once you get the hang of it but is a little bit of a pain at first.
The map on this game is pretty awesome. I was scared that the map would be a piddly little village of a city, where you have seen everything there is to see in an hour. Well you will probably have seen most of it in two hours but it isn't half bad. It is varied and has plenty of buildings which consist mainly of parking garages and warehouses but drifting up a spiral ramp and then driving full speed off of the roof through a billboard is great fun.
Speaking of billboards, there are a number of challenges in this game that can be completed as you go along. The main one is finding all of the jackspots for cars. Then you have the billboard challenge which is similar to the insane jumps challenge from GTA except they put boards on them for you to destroy. The idea was that you go around your city and make these jumps and log your jump distance. Then on your friends list if someone beats your jump, their gamer picture will appear on your board. The challenge is to keep beating your friends jump distance. But if you play solo the idea is to find all of the jumps and successfully land the jump. There are also a number of security gates, the idea is simple, find them all and drive through them, you get some wanted score when you do. All of these coupled with completing all races for each car leads on to give your 100% completion rating. Best of all though it adds a much needed variety to the gameplay.
This game is plagued with issues though unfortunately. The reason I've given this game a five start is because these issues are niggly at best, some aren't but some are and none of them really detach this game from the fun of playing it overall and that is what matters in a game overall in my opinion.
The first things I will say about this game is it is mental. The idea of racing for money and then buying a car and adding parts to it are over. You don't race for money, you race for a wanted score. The score increases based on taking out fellow racers and police cars, breaking through police blocks etc etc. The idea is you race until you have enough points to warrant a race with a rival. There are ten of them in total, and each requires a subsequent number of points which you get by winning races. But the strangeness comes in when finding cars because that is exactly what you do, you just find them. These cars are supposedly yours but there are about 120 different spots all over the map with these cars just sat there. And you simply drive up, press triangle to get in and drive off.
When starting a race you get these little cut scenes but they are so lunatic it is hard to understand what the point of them is. You are starting a circuit race and the cut scene before it is, a bunch of cars flying through the air, then your car comes in Back to the Future Part II style, lands on the road and the race starts. In another type of race where you have to outrun police in a set time has a cut scene where your car is driving along and police cars start falling out of the sky, then you are given control and you are off. Ludicrous.
Now the graphics in this game are pretty awesome. Not PS3 quality by any stretch of the imagination (or not as it happens to be) but very good. A noticeable problem is head lights and shadows. Headlights and tail lights are terrible, just a mass of pixels in front of you. And shadows are so jagged around the edges I often wonder if I could do better myself. I doubt it, but they are that bad.
The biggest problem with this game though is the resolution. For anyone who doesn't know what resolution is, it is the number of pixels that make up the image on the screen. If you have heard of resolution before you will have heard it in terms of TVs since 1920 x 1080, HD in other words which is a common thing these days. What that means is there are 1920 pixels on the longest dimension of the TV and 1080 on the shorter. Which on a very large TV is a good thing for quality. But if you try and cram that many pixels into a smaller screen what happens is you make everything really tiny. This is what is wrong with this game, it isn't 1080, it is less but being a five inch screen it becomes a problem very quickly. It means the text is very small. For someone with dodgy eye sight this will be a massive head ache. It also has the horrible effect of making distant obstacles like cars and walls (which you are supposed to avoid if driving) really hard to see, and going at 200mph in a supercar means they come up very quickly. Sometimes so quickly it is almost impossible to avoid. Sometimes it is bad enough on tight circuits that the only way to avoid them is to memorise where they are and hope you miss them. Couple this with the blurry headlights and driving on the wrong side of the road is damn right impossible.
This game has been described as Burnout with the Need for Speed title. It is far from this. Burnout is an over the top, heavy impact game where a simply collision can turn into a full blown explosion mid race. It is very fun. This game isn't that, there is a collision system, where if you hit a wall flat out your car will do some flips and get beat up a bit and will stop. Then you will re-spawn and get right back into it. But the collision detection is bad, to the point where I would call it down right broken sometimes. You can hit barriers on the motorway at full speed and depending on what phase of the moon is out will depend on whether that constitutes a crash or not. Other times you can clip a barrier or simply hit a obstacle that isn't really there and total. You can hit a police car head on and just keep racing straight through them like they weren't there but do that to a pedestrian and you will total straight away. No consistency, and rage inducing when it happens a hundred yards from the finish line.
Also this game has a very strange way of awarding your effort to pull of drifts or slipstreams. If you are going around a corner, even if the car ahead is pulling away and you pull a drift, on the same line they were going on, you will catch up to them. It almost looks like they are blatantly slowing down the car ahead to make the drift necessary. Same with slip streaming. Your speed largely stays the same when in someone's slip steam, yet after a couple of seconds slip steaming you will gain ground on the car ahead. Like somehow your presence behind them is putting resistance on them and slowing them down or something.
But having said all of that, this game is strange, doesn't feel like particularly heavy amounts of attention went into its development sometimes but overall it is very very fun to play. It flatters you when you pull off a 400 yard drift missing cars and police stingers as you go along. It is well worth a play.
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Klantenrecensies
Beste recensies uit andere landen
Dannystaples
Really baffling game
Beoordeeld in het Verenigd Koninkrijk op 1 juli 2013TheObogo
Best VITA game personally
Beoordeeld in het Verenigd Koninkrijk op 21 november 2013Lelisevis
Good arcade type game
Beoordeeld in het Verenigd Koninkrijk op 10 juli 2013Chunkster
Amazing with top notch graphics
Beoordeeld in het Verenigd Koninkrijk op 28 november 2017G. S. Shankrowalia
Great but lacks long term appeal
Beoordeeld in het Verenigd Koninkrijk op 15 juni 2013