City 16

Remember when I started a series of posts detailing my three favourite games in each genre? You may not, because it only ever wrote one post which was about 11 months ago. Still, this blog’s unofficial motto is pretty much ‘better late than never’ so here’s another one.

I’m also cheating by stretching the definition of rhythm games to include any game in which the primary focus is on music. Hence the first title in the list.

Rez: Dreamcast, Playstation 2 & Xbox 360 (as Rez HD)

You’re always putting yourself in a difficult position when talking about Rez. People tend to either champion it as genius or decry it as pretentious art-game crap. In other words it’s a bit Marmite, if Marmite were a Panzer Dragoon clone based on the works of Kandinsky with the stated aim of inducing synesthesia in the player. It’s also a weirdly personal game to be talking about. I know I love Rez, but I’ve never really bothered to stop and think why. It’s Rez, you know?

Okay, clearly I need to try harder. Let’s start with this: Rez is a complete fucking cheat. Its primary gimmick is to tie every sound the player can make – essentially shooting enemies by dragging the reticule over them – to the backing music. Except these inputs snap to the beat so whether you’re killing enemies, collecting power ups or progressing to the next layer, it will never fall out of rhythm. The game’s entire premise is tightly controlled to stop the player fucking it up by being human.

That’s not a criticism, however, because it’s what makes Rez work and, assuming you like 10 year old electronica, Rez does work. By controlling the moment enemies explode into symbols and noise to the constant unmoving beat, complimented by the vibration of the controller, it really can induce a sort of faux-synesthesia. Its most exciting moments occur mid-way through each level, as you’re phasing between layers and everything – art, sound, vibration – begins to intensify, driving towards its unstoppable climax.

More importantly, on a personal level, it was the first moment I realised that games could actually be this. It’s cemented itself along with other PS2 titles like Ico and We Love Katamari that said to my teenage self, “stick around, this might just get interesting.”

Gitaroo Man: Playstation 2 & PSP (as Gitaroo Man Lives!)

Oh sure, Parappa The Rappa was great with its geek-funk soundtrack and memorable lines (“I gotta believe!”) but Gitaroo Man was the truly brilliant rhythm game. The main reason for this is the Legendary Theme, but it had other charms as well.

Such as? Well for a start it pastiches a far wider selection of musical genres. The game covers jazz, rock, punk, synth, dub, drum ‘n bass, j-pop and, bizarrely, electro-salsa; all performed in a coherent cheery pop wrapping. As for actually playing the game, each level is divided into two segments, battle and defend. Defend is the familiar Parappa-esque matching of the face buttons as they fly toward the centre of the screen whereas battle has you trace out the guitar riff, hitting buttons in time to the notes. It’s standard muscle memory fare, but keeps enough variation to remain enjoyable throughout.

Then there’s the story, casting you as U-1, a shy boy who learns to have confidence in his abilities with the aid of a talking dog, a magical guitar and a trip through space to face musical enemies. Frankly it’s almost cliched in its Japanese loner child + weird shit approach, but has some nice moments throughout and skirts just the right side of not taking itself seriously.

And then there’s the Legendary Theme. It’s a serene acoustic tune in a game filled with manic pop, but that alone propels it up to being one of the greatest levels in any rhythm game.

Rock Band 2: Playstation 3 & Xbox 360

The temptation when compiling these lists is to gravitate to the more obscure titles to prove your gaming cred. Rejected games for this final spot included Vib Ribbon, the PS1 choose-your-own-music line art platformer, and Harmonix’s own precursor to Guitar Hero and Rock Band, Frequency. Both would clearly be cheating because, for fun times with music, you can’t beat Rock Band 2. It’s the ultimate post-pub game. My own personal litmus test for how drunk I am is whether I gravitate towards the drums (not that drunk) or vocals (very drunk.)

Why Rock Band 2 over any of the other peripheral based rhythm games? Primarily because it has a better tracklist than the first Rock Band, and the Guitar Hero series is now essentially a competent knock-off. Harmonix has always been able to craft better note charts for their tracks, and the whole experience feels slicker than the Activision version.

Really the only downside to coming home, loading up the game and taking Posthumous Meerkat out for another tour of the classics (by which I mean Steve Miller Band’s The Joker) is that it tends to get us into trouble with the neighbours after about 4am. To date it is easily the greatest multiplayer rhythm game.

Of course, I’ve missed out plenty. From Vib Ribbon through to Audiosurf. Let me know your own favourite music games in the comments.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game?

That’s your title?

Just appending The Game after a colon screams shitty cobbled together movie cash-in to anyone who’s had to suffer through 20+ years of shitty cobbled together movie cash-ins. Way to paint your game as the next tier of a synergistic marketing campaign dickheads.

Especially when your game is actually good.

That’s because Scott Pilgrim vs. The Game (which is what it should have been called) draws as much inspiration from gaming’s past as it does from the comic series/movie it’s based on; the lazy reference point in fact being River City Ransom or, for those of us who didn’t own a NES, Streets of Rage. Scott must fight his way through seven 2.5D levels, defeating the boss (evil-ex) at the end of each. You do this with the aid of two attack buttons, a block and a jump, with a further two special moves that deplete your ‘guts’ points. Bish, bash and indeed bosh.

Importantly, despite the pixel art graphics and chiptune audio, this is no mere recreation or even parody of the side scrolling beat ‘em up, both of which being styles that tend to slavishly recreate all the flaws inherent within their chosen genre. It’s an homage (Edgar Wright would be proud) to gaming’s past, leaving it free to modernise key systems to try and remove some of the flaws and annoyances found in those early titles.

The most obvious of these is a levelling system. Those of you who may decry the needless addition of character levelling to any game as a cynical attempt to artificially create replayability will be reassured to know that it’s just as pointless here. Killing enemies grants XP which unlocks extra moves. Most of the moves feel like they should have been there from the beginning, with only a few of the latter ones feeling like they add advanced tactics to the combat.

More successful is the upgrade system. Killed enemies drop coins which can be used at the shops littered throughout the game to buy items. As well as recharging your health and guts points these items can also upgrade Scott or one of the three other initial characters in strength, speed, willpower and defence. It means that even failed attempts to complete a level are rewarded as your character’s stats are persistent meaning any money earned on that run will carry over to your next attempt, bringing you closer to another upgrade to aid progress.

This reduction of frustration is one of the triumphs of the game. Unlike its old-school forbearers, SPvTW:TG’s only punishment for losing all lives is to be kicked back to the start of that level, not the entire game. Levels also aren’t timed, leaving you free to explore and, more importantly, nip back to a shop to recoup your health, without ever feeling the need to recklessly hurray forward before you run out of time. These are essential changes because, initially at least, it’s a bloody difficult game.

The result of this is the game is an absolute joy to play, evoking for a certain segment of gamers the warm nostalgia of biffing your way through unlikely streets full of adversaries without providing the stark realisation that gaming was hard as fuck back in those days. It’s also chock full of references to gaming’s past from graffiti on the walls right through to specific character animations, all of which are nestled against the Toronto hipster-scene setting of the comic to provide a game that feels strangely modern in all its reminiscence.

Wherein lies a problem. This clash between retro gaming and the original comic series may as well have been laser targeted for me, especially as I also know enough about the chiptune scene to freak out slightly on hearing Anamanaguchi were doing the (brilliant) soundtrack. If you’re in a similar position then the game is essential and chances are you’ve already bought it. Can it be recommended to those unfamiliar with the source material though? In some respects yes, as the majority of references are passive and limited to inconsequential things like ancillary characters lining the street or the fact that the only 1-up earned in open play comes from defeating the third boss.

It’s fun either way and the majority of the plot is eschewed for visual touches, like the dialogue which is replaced with text message-esque emoticons. My flatmate, who has no knowledge of the series, has enjoyed numerous co-op sessions only occasionally stopping to ask why his special move was a 17 year old Chinese girl who grants his character health by snogging her. Presentation aside it’s a clear genre piece and it’s that which should inform how much enjoyment you’ll get from the game and not whether you understand why the high score screen is titled “The Best 24 Year Old Ever!”

In an effort to once and for all put to bed rumours that PC gaming is for sad, fat, lonely men with nothing better to do than order virtual men around under the illusion of grandeur and jerk off to 4chan, I moved the PC downstairs to be the primary entertainment provider for last Friday’s boozing session. Also because I was bored of my console collection. Here then is a round up of PC games as a social experience.

Plants vs Zombies

Did you know that the game that has kept you isolated and alone for months on end is also a great one to play with friends, despite its complete lack of multiplayer? It’s true, and also a frightening example of how the bloody thing can completely destroy every corner of your life! Kudos, Popcap. Endless survival mode was our primary drug for the weekend, with one person taking up the controls and the onlookers taking up the dual roles of strategy consultants and battlefield managers, providing such helpful advice as, “fifth row needs spikes, replace the second row’s Tall-Nuts, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD MAN GET YOUR FUCKING CAT-TAILS UP!”

Seeing as it was Fitz who was the most deeply ensconced in the Plants vs Zombies addiction, he spent most of the night at the helm with myself and Adam providing moral, as well as practical, guidance. This culminated in an impressive (for us) 24 flag run before some complete idiot forgot to bring the Lily-pads along to the next level and everything went to shit. Annoyingly we then thought it would be a good idea to have a look at some YouTube tactics, which preceeded to ruin the whole thing by showing builds that can get you to 1,000+ flags. It kind of destroys the urge to build on your own tactics when you know how to completely kick shit out of the game.

Plants! Also zombies.

QWOP

For comedy potential nothing can be better than a few rounds of web game QWOP among friends when you’re a little bit drunk. With co-ordination already at an all time low any chance of not being completely shit goes out the window. Normally it’s the kind of game you’d try a few times and get bored of, but with people around a perverse competitive element comes to the fore. All of a sudden the keyboard is being passed around as you dare the next person to beat your personal best of 1.7 metres. The funniest moments are when someone actually starts doing well (read: takes 1 and a half steps relatively smoothly) then subsequently fucks it all up when trying to replicate the action.

Just Cause 2

Disaster! BOLOPatch no longer works with Just Cause 2 after an update to the game! This means that infinite ammo, infinite health and the all important ‘strong rope’ that it provides are no longer available to people who are just loading it up to have a dick about. This is especially a problem when you’ve installed a mod that increases the power of the C4 tenfold, as you will almost definitely be killed every time you use it. Aw, man!

Oh technically you can have fun with the unpatched, unmodded version. We played hours of it in its natural state on PS3, but that game got completed. Now the fun comes from sticking on a load of stupid mods, an unbreakable tether and making sure that inconveniences like running out of ammo or dying are never a problem. It becomes a game of messing about until inspiration hits a person, who asks “I wonder if we can tether a car to a jumbo jet, plant the car with C4 and then, just as it flies over a military base, untether it, ride it down onto the base like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove and detonate the C4 on impact?” With BOLOPatch out of commission you no longer can.

Explosions! Also death.

Left 4 Dead

After countless failures, I did another search for a step-by-step guide to getting Left 4 Dead working in splitscreen and, lo-and-behold, this time I came across an up-to-date version that accounted for the patch Valve added that stopped the old method working. It takes numerous console commands, re-jigging some config files and unplugging and replugging an Xbox controller at exactly the right moment but by Jove we got it to work. Adam vaguely wondered why they wouldn’t just add an option for splitscreen into the main menu, clearly showing he misses something fundamental about doing any task on a PC.

Anyway, this marks the easiest way for me to play some Left 4 Dead. Both games have been out so long now that joining a public match is tantamount to asking for someone to shout abuse in your face for an hour and most people I know who own the game are long since done with it. The downside is you’re forced to have two characters played by the AI, but they’re competent enough and the ease by which you can guide your other human teammate by literally pointing at the screen and talking them through sections more than makes up for it. I even started to experience those moments that people who play with friends over headsets were talking about long ago, specifically moments like: “Oh, I’m glad you’re all cosy in the safehouse, but would you mind awfully just popping out for a second and dealing with this zombie that is literally raping my face?! There’s a dear.”

Zombies! Also plants.

Stupid idea: Set up a Steam community with me as the admin responsible for setting up community events. The reason for this is I’m lazy and rubbish at organising things, as has been the case. My solution is sheer elegance in its lunacy.

From now on the ‘Schedule an event’ option is open to all members, new and old. If you’re looking for some extra people for a multiplayer game (TF2, Battlefield, The Ship) or one of the increasing number of co-op games (Left 4 Dead, Alien Swarm) then just schedule an event from the group page and the call will go out to everyone in the group to act on or ignore as they wish.

Obviously the system works better the more people the group has, which brings me to change two: I’m going to start downplaying the link between this site and the group. Essentially it strikes me as easier to get more people if they aren’t wondering why the hell they’re being invited to join a group for a small gaming blog somewhere out in the darker recesses of the Internet.

So, feel free to try out the system. I’ve no idea what games other members actually have, but between us we’re bound to have the main releases covered.

There’s a room in VVVVVV, an absolute shit of a room, that tasks your character with getting a shiny collectible trinket on the other side of a small box. It looks a little like this:

After the multiple hours it took to complete this task I grew to be thankful for its existence.

“Really Phil, it took you multiple hours to get to the other side of a small box?”

Yes, it did. Like I said the room is a complete fucking bastard of a twat. As you can see, we still have something of a fractious relationship. You see, in VVVVVV, there is no jump button. Instead you reverse gravity, flying up into the air until you reach the roof, at which point you can revert gravity back and start plummeting to meet the ground. As you can see from the screenshot, this room has no roof. Instead it has this:

Like I said, Bastard. Like I also said, I’m grateful for its existence. Why? Because it reminded me that I don’t just take on ridiculously difficult challenges because there’s an achievement involved. I’m also prepared to do them when there’s absolutely no discernible reward whatsoever.

Death.

That might not sound like much but it’s an important distinction. My previous attempt at a high difficulty/low margin-of-error feat of finger dexterity was completing Trine’s last level on very-hard with no-one dying, a task which nabbed a ‘Better Than Developers!‘ trophy. All well and good, and more than a little satisfying on completion, but that satisfaction is tempered by the question, “did I just go through all that for an achievement?” Despite the number I’ve managed to accumulate I guess I’ve still not decided if I’m OK with the whole achievements thing.

Death.

Veni, Vidi, Vici, which seems to have become the shorthand name for this challenge room in VVVVVV, reminded me that actually I just like these trial and error based high-difficulty challenges. It’s the reason I took to the Skate series of games and the reason I’m currently enjoying the WiiWare game Bit.Trip Runner. Perhaps it took me so long to come to this realisation because you just don’t see this style very often in games today. As the industry becomes more profitable challenge is left behind in favour of accessibility, because God help us if a publisher’s latest AAA title is beyond some perceived key demographic.

Death.

That last sentence probably sounded more vitriolic than intended. More accessible games are a brilliant thing because, for the most part, developers are terrible at difficulty. I’ve been playing Darksiders recently and came close to giving up on it for good after encountering the first proper boss fight. In the tradition of boss fights in games (which incidentally are all terrible and need to just fuck off for good) the key to success was in realising which of my character’s array of offensive and defensive manoeuvres could be combined against the boss’ varying attack patterns. In a way boss design harks back to the worst adventure puzzles and defeating one is reminiscent of figuring out that honey on the cat hair makes a moustache, except if you don’t realise it in 20 seconds a giant demon bat will scorch your bollocks off with fireballs.

Death.

Of course that’s just sudden and inexplicable difficulty spikes. When hidden systems in the game can mean the difference between success and failure the frustration levels go through the roof. Take Split/Second, a game which increases the difficulty of rival racers the better you do. The upshot is there’s no way at actually being good at the game, because early success just sets you up for failure towards the end. The general rule of thumb with Split/Second is that, if you’re doing well, the game will be decided at the last corner at which point an opponent will always – always – overtake you. Unless you’re able to destroy the car at that point you will lose and a poor defenseless controller may lose its life against a wall.

Death.

What Veni, Vidi, Vici, and VVVVVV as a whole – what all games that can successfully capture that addictive one-more-go feel of defeating a seemingly insurmountable obstacle – understand is that to be enjoyable the difficulty should be transparent. It gives you six screens that you have to learn forwards and back – or more accurately upwards and down – and then link together in one glorious and flawless run. That is the sole source of difficulty. There is nothing added that would suggest to the player that failure is anything other than their own fault. It even removes the annoyances of the era of gaming that it evokes; there aren’t limited lives and the checkpointing is generous. With no penalty for death all that remains is the challenge at hand.

Death.

And what a challenge. It’s both a beauty and a bastard. You have to learn each room sequentially, learning just how much to manoeuvre left and right, where the key apex points are to swing to safety and, at times, take seemingly counter intuitive actions to line up for the next screen. After a while your brain understands the route and all that’s left is for muscle memory to kick in and let the fingers learn it. At this point it’s best to let your mind wander while the rest of you gets on with it. While navigating an especially tricky section I drafted this sentence, including this clause here where I mention how I’m mentioning this clause. On reflection it wasn’t a great sentence, but it got me through the top flip down to 5th screen so I’m leaving it in out of respect to my past self.

Each section becomes exponentially harder, as it requires navigation of every preceding screen before you can even practice what’s ahead, but the slightest hint of progression is a joyous occasion that drives you to get even further. In fact, the most soul-destroying moments are when you suddenly lose control of all co-ordination and can’t get past the second screen… dark times. After a couple of hours I was back at the bottom, at which point I killed myself on the right-hand side spikes in a foolish effort to not land on the wrong side. It should have been demoralising, but I was just so happy to be within reach.

Success! Shortly followed by death.

Just be aware that if you try it before you go to sleep you will have that music stuck in your head all night.

Clearly the free game route is the way to go for now, but after the month long Neptune’s Pride betrayal-a-thon it’s probably a good idea for the next community event to be a little (a lot) shorter. We’re in luck.

Alien Swarm is the newly released 4 player top-down shooter from Valve. It’s also completely free, just go to the Steam page to install it. Games are scheduled for tomorrow evening, just find me in game. If you stick something in this posts comments thread then I’ll invite you in when the game’s set up to make the process a little easier.

If you’re wondering how the game plays, imagine a co-op version of Shadowgrounds or one of around 600 million freeware games and you’d be in the right ballpark. Here’s a trailer to give you a taste. Short version: their are aliens, they come in swarms.

If you want to join our Steam community (now up to a dizzying 6 members!) here’s the page.

UPDATE: As an added incentive, if you complete two campaigns in Alien Swarm, you get a hat for Team Fortress 2. Any excuse to add new hats…

It’s all over. We emerge blinking and dazed from the harsh light of the world after 11 (!) days of cheap games. As people all over the world find excuses to not check their bank balance, I ask this simple question: How was it for you?

I have a slightly unnerving 34 extra games in my Steam list, although most of these came through the single purchase of the complete THQ collection.  How much did you buy? Anything you’ve been pleasantly surprised with? Or were there games that, in the cold light of day, you probably wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) have bothered with?

Personally I used it as an excuse to pick up a bunch of games I’d been hesitant to buy in the past: Metro 2033, The Void, Overlord II, Stalker: Clear Sky and Lead and Gold, among others. I also grabbed a few titles that I’d not been a big fan of in the past, like Saints Row II and Kane and Lynch, with the aim of giving them another chance. Then, of course, as is always the way with buying a collection of publisher specific games, there are the games I really have no intention of ever playing. In this case I’m talking about Company of Heroes, which will forever sit inside my games list, silently mocking me. The bastard.

Still, overall a good haul, even if it does mean that, at some point, I will end up playing a game called World of Zoo. How did you fare?

Red Dead Redemption feels like the complete opposite. The world is huge (and feels even bigger because your main method of transportation has exactly 1 horse power) but largely barren. It means the interactions you do come across – and there are plenty of them, from travellers in need of help through to wannabe gunslingers looking to make a name for themselves by duelling the best in the west – feel more meaningful. They’re no less scripted, but the sense of community born out of a place where the environment is deadlier than the inhabitants lends these small world events a degree of authenticity. Even now, after logging about 70 hours with the game, I feel a small pang of guilt when I ignore a man whose wife has been kidnapped to hunt bears.

His survival chance decreased dramatically after I actually learned how to duel.

As I drew closer to my objective I let my guard slip and, without warning, the growl of a cougar and a flashing red screen let me know I’d been careless. Luckily it didn’t land the second, fatal, attack. After I’d killed it I had to pause the game, catch my breath and make a cup of tea. Cougars, man. Fucking cougars.

Seriously: fucking cougars

Elsewhere the story is somewhat of a mixed bag. Each character you can do missions for hangs around a little too long. After your 4th or 5th long horse ride with the same person retelling you their philosophy of the west you start to wish the character didn’t refuse to fire at friendly NPCs. Even Marston himself runs out of interesting ways to tell people he’s trying to save his family far before he stops telling people he’s trying to save his family.

"Hey, John. Have I told you about how I'm a grumpy old curmudgeon trying to bring a little law and order to my town? No, you're probably right, now isn't the time."

More successful than the story missions are the strangers you encounter throughout your travels. These are essentially narrative-vignettes about people trying to make their way in the region; writers looking to capture the romanticism of the era, producers looking to forge a new age of cinema and even just concerned spouses looking for their loved ones. The first ones you come across will all too often result in the stranger turning out to be mental, to the point where you start trying to second guess each person’s particular deviancy, but as the game goes on you’ll find some genuinely interesting characters that you’ll encounter in multiple places throughout the game. Particularly worthy of mention is the ‘I Know You’ strand, featuring an unknown man with a penchant for testing your moral fibre. It’s one of the most intriguing mysteries of the game and its resolution ties-in brilliantly with the final cutscene.

So, a couple of story niggles aside, pretty much perfect then? Not quite. Red Dead Redemption is unusual in recent Rockstar games in that many of the core systems at work are non-diegetic. Take the fast-travel; you just need to set up a camp and with a couple of clicks you can travel instantly to any location you’ve previously visited. Bizarrely the game also includes an in-world fast travel system with coaches that can be hired. Pay for a coach or move a few feet away and travel for free? Unless you’re deliberately trying to preserve the atmosphere it’s not much of a decision.

Marston contemplates the mystery of the fast-travel fire.

Death is handled in a similarly blunt manner with the game displaying a hilariously over-sized DEAD screen and reloading the last auto-save. There are plenty of doctors dwelling in major settlements so why not just have your character wake up there à la GTA? Also, and this is getting really picky, there’s really no excuse for your character to die the moment he steps in a body of water. How much this stuff bothers you is probably dependent on how much you buy into the atmosphere woven by the setting, visuals and audio. In case it’s not clear yet I bought into it a lot, much to the consternation of my flatmate who kept reminding me that I could fast-travel instead of taking 15 minutes to ride my horse into Mexico. I hadn’t forgotten Chris, I was just ignoring it.

TL;DR version: Red Dead Redemption, it’s better than GTA.

That’s right, I’ve been doing this shit for a year now! Hurrah! Actually it’s been 1 year and 18 days, but I always forget birthdays. So while I warm up the Celebratron-3000 for some super-fun-party-times, here’s a rundown of the highlights of the past year… and by highlights I mean “things I can still read without wanting to punch myself in the face.” Self-congratulation, go!

• The second ever post on the site, probably what tipped me over the edge into setting up a dedicated games blog in the first place, was about Braid’s hidden message on obsession.
• Shortly after that I ran out of topics for intelligent analysis, so instead wrote some shit about the first hour of a bunch of games. Here’s Jade Empire, which I hated, and Dawn of War 2, which I quite liked.
• A picture diary of my favourite Fallout 3 sidequest.
• A couple of weeks with Battlefield: Heroes got me thinking about snipers in online games. Conclusion: They’re bastards, but probably necessary bastards.
• Generally I manage to avoid flying into a rant about something I’ve seen on the Internet. Generally, but not always.
• Probably the weirdest game I’ve chosen to do an hour with post about. Pathologic.
• Some thoughts on character creation led to some interesting discussion in the comments thread. God bless you people, you do make the time spent writing this stuff seem worthwhile.
• The Bad Company 2 beta led to some of the tensest moments I’d felt in an online shooter for a long time. Here’s me attempting to capture that feeling.
• Highlight of the last year: Reckless Disregard for Gravity’s developers showing up in this post to say thanks!
• I’m not normally bothered about things like DRM. Ubisoft’s turned out to be an exception.
• Finally, my recent attempt at spending an hour with Red Faction Guerrilla turned out to be a worst-of of things that can wrong with PC gaming. It all turned out good in the end though.

So, it just remains for me to say thanks for reading the site. Here’s to another year!

[It's been a while since we've had a guest post at the site, so when District 16 member and former Neptune's Pride nemesis MrEff asked if I wanted a review for Split/Second I said yes. Mostly to find out if the game was any good. -Phil]

Ask yourself this; what would be the result if Michael Bay decided to make a racing game? The Answer: Split/Second. Made by Black Rock Studios and set as a fictional reality TV show Split/Second is an arcade racing game that allows you to blow away the competition, literally.

Unlike other arcade racers you don’t pick up weapons to use against the other racer, rather you build up ‘power plays’ that can be used to trigger events on and around the race track. The system used is simple; you draft, drift and jump to build up three bars that can be used to activate these power plays. Level one will cause cars and trucks by the side of the track to explode, helicopters hovering overhead to drop explosive barrels or will open up shortcuts to shave a couple of seconds off your time. Level two power plays are aimed to take out multiple opponents with buildings collapsing, producing larger explosions. Let your bar reach level three however and that is where the fun begins. Maxed out you can use it to activate route changers that can change the path of the track and lead to destruction on a truly epic scale. For example, one that is worthy of a mention is in the Airport Terminal race. Here you can detonate explosives placed in an aircraft control tower, leading to it collapsing and diverting you onto the runway. Come around the next lap and you have access to a level two power play that causes a huge jet plane to crash land on the very runway that you are racing down.

All of this action hurtles along at a blistering speed allowing you little time to admire the scenery, which is a shame. On the PC, with the graphics on high, the cars, track and various things that will soon be exploding or on fire all look beautiful. The frame rate never drops low either, even when everything is trying it’s hardest to wreck you. Also worth mentioning is the HUD used. Rather than filling the top of the screen like most racing games, the bare minimum of information that you need is positioned floating behind your car. This is an ingenious idea since it frees up the screen allowing you keep an eye out for any hazards that block your path.

Racing isn’t the only type of event that the game has to offer though; you get detonator, survival, air attack and air strike modes as well. Detonator has you performing a single lap against the clock as all the power plays are activated in front of you, leading to some spectacular near misses. Survival has you trying to overtake trucks flinging explosive barrels in your path. The blue ones slow you down while red ones blow you up, wrecking your car. Air attack has you racing round the track trying to avoid missiles raining down from a helicopter trying to take you out and air revenge has you deflecting those missiles back at the helicopter trying to take it down.

Even though the cars aren’t licensed models they all look fantastic and handle appropriately with the SUVs being slow but sturdy, the muscle cars wanting to drift at every opportunity and the sports cars zipping along at an incredible pace.

This isn’t to say that the game is perfect. You can only activate power plays in front of you, and many of them only if there is another car present to try and take out. It would have been nice to be able to activate them behind you too to slow down the other cars, which can be problematic due to the rubber-banding used to keep the action going. Thanks to this you can never get a good lead, there will always be another car not too far away to try and stop you from winning. On the plus side this makes for some intense races where you can’t relax until you have crossed the line, on the minus you feel cheated when you are taken out on the last corner of the last lap and denied the win you fought so hard to get. Furthermore when drifting you do lose quite a bit of speed. Considering that this is one of the main ways to fill your power play meter it seems a little odd that it slows you down, sometimes almost as much as just ploughing into the barrier and letting that guide you round the corner.

You do have access to online multiplayer and a split screen modes that allow you to take on human opponents, though they are a bit anemic. There are only three different types of event you can chose from, race, survival and elimination, which makes it feel like the multiplayer was an after thought tacked on at the end of production. However all three events still run smoothly, though you may want to wait until you have unlocked a few of the faster cars before you jump in.

Overall Split/Second is a great game. It may not be perfect but it offers something unique in a racing game and is incredible fun. If you are looking for something a bit different then I would highly recommend it.

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