Not Casual

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It’s name that tune time again and perhaps I’ll even be able to throw in a review of Black Rock’s latest racer:

“Never, never try to gauge temperature”
“When you tend to travel”
“At such speed”
“It’s Our Velocity”

It’s time to head up to the starting grid and burn some rubber once again, but with an already overcrowded market with such great titles like Forza 3, Need For Speed: Shift (NFS:S), Project Gotham Racing 5 (PGR5), Test Drive Unlimited (TDU), Burnout Paradise (BP) and the forthcoming Blur, can Split/Second: Velocity (S/S:V) stand out from the crowd?

Experience

S/S:V is unashamedly an arcade racer and therefore has more in common with the likes of PGR5 and BP. From the offset S/S:V throws you right into the action using the premise of making the players take part in a fictional reality TV show, consisting of a variety of events, each focusing on destructible environments triggered remotely by driver actions known as “powerplays”. These “powerplays” are special events can be triggered which create obstacles for other players, create shortcuts or alter the race course entirely.

The use of “powerplays” are introduced via a tutorial race which teaches you the mechanics of the game whilst throwing you into the meat of the game. This method has the added benefit of letting you find your own way through the game without feeling separated from the game’s environment. There are two levels of severity of “powerplays”; blue and red. Blue level “powerplays” tend to affect cars directly in front of your vehicle and are not nearly as destructive as the explosive red level.

I’ve yet to really experience a single-player race beyond this tutorial as Murray and Jamie were both online with the game so we quickly jumped into a Private Party race via Xbox Live. It was at this point that the game really came into it’s own for me, despite my car being a couple of levels below both Murray’s and Jamie’s (they’d both previously played the game enough prior to this session to level up their cars a bit) I was still able to grab a podium finish on a couple of occasions.

We quickly found that the “powerplays” could make or break a race for you, and they didn’t necessarily mean that activating them would not automatically equate to a win for you. In fact, more than once one of us would deploy an exploding barrel against an opponent only for it to miss the target and hit the instigator themselves as they turned the corner. The “powerplays” never became cheap, as this risk of it literally blowing up in your face means that you have to be tactical with your deployment. You also can’t just activate a “powerplay” whenever you wish as you need to build up the meter by performing stunts such as jumps, drafting and precision driving such as passing very close to objects and drifting.

The controls Black Rock Studios have utilised are intuitive and easy to master, although to be fair in a racing game anything that shifts away from the right trigger acceleration and break on the left trigger will miss something fundamental about how such games work. Also all of the unnecessary elements such as the speedometer and the track map have been removed from the HUD leaving only the lap count, position that the player is in, and the “powerplay” meter, all positioned behind the car itself, so as to leave more room to display visuals.

This clean HUD gives more real-estate for the gorgeous visuals and frenetic action to take place, and the action is really frenetic. Speeding cars trading paint, exploding vehicles flying through the air and buildings crashing into your path means that each lap of a course is always different.

The sound design is also really immersive with explosions and car engines all sounding as they should, in fact the only slight misstep I found is in the musical soundtrack. Compared to PGR5 or BP I found the musical choices quite generic Euro-Dance and made no real impression except to become slightly irritating when I pay close attention to it.

Verdict

I’ve not nearly spent enough time with this game, and that’s purely due to the fact that Red Dead Redemption (RDR) launched in the same week. We’ve got Blur launching this week and so S/S:V has got some serious competition from the creators of PGR5, but I feel it does enough different to carve its own audience. For me, this game is the best arcade racer I have played since Burnout 4: Revenge (B4:R), and does a lot of what BP does but so much better. However, I can see that the single player campaign much like B4:R could get a bit repetitive so it would lean towards a rent if you never plan to play online, but multiplayer with friends is fun and a makes it a definite buy.

Tags: driving, live, muliplayer, racing

Categories: Xbox

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