What makes a good driving game? The best visuals, physics, modes, and fun cars to drive. It is all like a synchronized dance and all has to flow together.
Criterion are geniuses for a reason. The masterminds behind the Burnout franchise, EA game them the keys to Need for Speed and have made two great games already. Most Wanted is just slick, fast, and streamlined. The game is so much fun that you will never feel bored. There are a lot of fun modes and Autolog can’t be topped. The game also looks fantastic on Vita and PC. Transformed came in a close second, but just doesn’t feel as slick as Most Wanted.
The fourth DiRT game to come from Codemasters was out of the left field. A rally racing simulator turned arcade demolition derby? The truth of the matter is that the game is solid and is a lot of fun with friends. The single-player AI is frustrating and annoying, but after you finish these events for achievements, you won’t come back to it. Some people seem to be pretty harsh on the game, so let me stamp out a few fires here. It’s the AI that makes it feel like you have low top speed. The game has a very fast sense of speed, but Codemasters chose to use the much-hated “rubber-band AI.”.
There are several events you can play, such as 8-Ball, which reminded me of Hot Wheels’ Criss-Cross-Crash track set from when I was a kid. There are good ol’ demolition derbies and regular race-offs. There are no real-world cars available for these events, only in Gymkhana. I’m kind of torn with this event because I found it too difficult in DiRT 3, even with all the assists. I found it much easier this time around, but the only event I really liked was one where you had to smash down colored blocks in a certain order.
Other than that, the game is a standard DiRT affair. Beat the main event, play online, rinse, and repeat until you race yourself to boredom. I found playing online a ton of fun, but after a while, the novelty wears off, and you get sick of the game after a while. If Codemasters put some other gameplay elements in here to deter that, it wouldn’t be this way. From what we have, DiRT: Showdown is an extremely fun arcade racer with gorgeous visuals, but don’t expect to stay for too long.
Trials practically invented the 2D motocross physics genre, and now it has evolved the series a bit like the title implies. No longer are you confined to cramped and dark indoor environments or just being able to push your bike around. Now there is a bit of customization with some outdoor stuff thrown in, but the levels just got a whole lot crazier.
For starters, the levels are better designed and can actually be mastered with practice on higher difficulties. The physics are a lot better, so you feel like you are mastering levels of skill rather than dumb luck. The environments get pretty crazy with huge explosions, rushing water, sinking and rising platforms, and even some crazy mini-games. You can pick what bike you want now, so there is something here that anybody can master. The best part about this game is that every level is different. There are so many different levels that looking forward to the next one is fun. Some are so crazy that you are actually riding on a roller coaster track and actually feel like you’re on one. Making huge jumps, steep drops, and crazy stunts makes you feel the adrenaline rush. The catch is that you have to be good at the game this time to master it and get gold medals.
Restarting at the checkpoints is as simple as pressing B and continuing on. Usually, you will mess up a lot until you master the levels. Then, you need to know just the right acceleration at certain jumps and how to angle the bike. The last stages take precise memorization to master, but it’s fun because every time you retry, you get better and better. There are some mini-games thrown in here, but I was disappointed with them. The physics don’t really work with mini-games that try to do crazy things like the UFO one. As you accelerate, your UFO will climb, but you have to land in a certain spot. I found this almost impossible because my UFO kept flipping around and landing upside down. There are a few mini-games on SkyRiding that involve riding sand, which is odd because you feel very top-heavy. The best ones are when you are just on your bike and doing things like conserving fuel between fuel stations or trying to get as far as you can while flying through the air. Only a few are fun, but at least there’s something different here.
Lastly, there’s a track editor that I am not a fan of. I’m actually not a fan of any track editor because I prefer playing a game already made for me, but it’s there for people who like that sort of thing. It’s not very intuitive, but what is a console-based editor? There are some customization options here that are pretty shallow. You can customize your bike, but only aesthetically, and customizing your rider is about as simple as it gets. There’s no option for a female rider, which is disappointing. I really like where the series is going, and hopefully the next one will take it even further.
In the end, Trials Evolution has great physics and has more variety in environments this time around. You actually feel like you master the levels of skill and not luck. The customization options are pretty shallow and basic, but a few mini-games are the least fun. The track editor is very unwieldy, but that will be to everyone’s taste. Trials Evolution is a solid Xbox LIVE arcade game that any motocross fan will enjoy.
Wipeout is one of the longest-running racing series out there, debuting on the original PlayStation and spanning every PlayStation console ever since. 2048 is the first Wipeout on the Vita, so what would a PlayStation console launch be like without a Wipeout title? 2048 doesn’t really do much to change the series, which it desperately needs, so that is probably the worst part about the game. Overall, this is a very solid Wipeout game.
Everyone mainly looks forward to how far a Wipeout game can push a console. The game looks amazing on the Vita, with a great sense of speed. Wipeout is known for a wide variety of event types, and 2048 delivers there too. There’s a time attack, zone events, and a new combat-type event. I don’t know why this wasn’t in any previous Wipeouts, but you just go around destroying as many vehicles as you can and earn points. Zone events return where the car accelerates on its own and you just have to survive. I wish there were more original event types, but what’s here works fine, and there are a lot of them.
The vehicle classes are fun, and the speed ramps up pretty quick in this version. B to A has a huge difference, but some fans may turn their noses up at the thought. I preferred this, but don’t worry, there are plenty of vehicles to unlock and use, so you can fine-tune your play style just the way you want. There are plenty of unique tracks that look great and are designed well. My major complaint is that there aren’t any new weapons. The same earthquake, rocket, missile, mine, etc. are still present and haven’t ever changed.
Multiplayer is where the fun is, but this time there is Wi-Fi, so you can play online. A huge complaint I have is that the load times are just absolutely atrocious. There have been patches since release to shorten them, but they are still pretty long and need to be cut down even more. If you can look past these issues, then 2048 is the best racer on the Vita right now. The game controls very well thanks to the actual analog stick, so PSP fans will notice smoother controls this time around. If you own the PS3 Wipeout, you can do cross-play, which is fun and makes you feel like you’ve got your money’s worth.
Overall, longtime fans may either hate this game or love it, depending on how they feel about the series as it stands today. It really needs some renovation with new weapons, event types, and maybe some customization. 2048 is stunning to look at on the Vita, but it suffers some seriously long load times in turn.
Need for Speed has taken many different directions, but the mid- to late-2000s were the worst for the series. ProStreet is probably the worst NFS I have played, and I can’t really recommend this to even hardcore fans. The game has good customization options and varied event types, but after a couple dozen races, you will be bored.
Races consist of earning a certain amount of points to “dominate the day.” These events range from drifts, drags, grips, time attacks, and sector shootouts. Sector Shootout is where you have a track divided into sections, and you must get the fastest times in those sections to win. Grip races are straight-up races, and the rest is history. Out of these events, the drags are the best because you need to heat up your tires before racing. You can only win by getting perfect shifts, but after you get NOS upgrades, the drags become really easy. There are 1/4 mile and 1/2 mile drags, but I would have liked to see 3/4 and 1 mile drags as well. All the other races are pretty boring, and drifting in the game feels like dragging an 18-wheeler through the dirt. No matter what car you use, drifting never feels right and is a huge pain to pull off.
The game was one of the first NFS games that used real-time damage, which is supposed to affect the way the car drives but really doesn’t. You can get light and heavy damage, but I never really noticed much of a hit in performance. If you damage your car, you have to repair it before the next race, but you can use cash or repair markers that you earn. My biggest issue with these “Race Days” is that if you quit in the middle, you have to restart the whole thing. This drove me nuts because I couldn’t go upgrade my car and come back.
Upgrading your cars is pretty fun because there are a lot of options for both performance and cosmetics. You can fine-tune your car as well, but there is a quick upgrade option for impatient people. You can only have certain cars for certain event types, but you can only save customizations as blueprints. This allows you to have multiple looks and load-outs for your cars. I found that cash is given very slowly and parts are very expensive, so you won’t be upgrading very often, which is a huge bummer.
Lastly, the game is just monotonous. After about a couple dozen races, you will feel fed up with the same tired races over and over again. The physics feel too weighty, and most cars feel the same no matter how you upgrade them. The whole game is really unbalanced and poorly designed. The game doesn’t even officially support the Game for Windows controller and just shows keyboard buttons instead. I just gave up about halfway through because some races were always easy, no matter who you were, and some were extremely difficult, no matter how good you were. The visuals are decent, but not anything to write home about. The announcer is just extremely annoying to listen to with his stoner one-liners, and he just blabbers on about nonsense.
Overall, ProStreet wasn’t very good when it came out and isn’t 5 years later. There were, and still are, better racing games out there. I can’t really recommend this game unless you like monotony and repetitive nonsense. ProStreet is half-broken and highly unbalanced. As it stands, this is probably the worst NFS out there right now.
The DiRT series has come a long way from the Colin McRae Rally series and has been around for over 15 years. Codemasters has always pushed for the latest hardware for the best physics and graphics possible, and DiRT 3 is no exception. Not much has changed from DiRT 2 besides a visual, physics, car roster, and track upgrade. The core gameplay is pretty much the same. This time around, the visual aesthetics steer away from the street gang style of art and move onto a weird psychedelic thing about triangles—don’t ask me.
The main attraction here is the new Gymkhana events, which are all about tricks. Doing donuts, spins, getting air, drifting, and all the fun stuff you can’t do on the track. Pull out into a third-person view (it’s not really possible in the first person) and tear around the area, trying to rack up a certain amount of points, beat a speed run, or smash into a certain amount of objects. It’s all great fun, but it takes a lot of time to master. The cars can be squirrely because of how powerful they are, and learning when to time each trick takes hours. You will get frustrated early on, but keep at it because once you unlock the Battersea Compound to complete 80 missions, you will master it there.
All the other event types are back, such as Rally Cross, Rally, Land Rush, Trailblazer, etc. My biggest gripe is that there aren’t any new event types besides Gymkhana. The repetitive nature sets in at about the halfway point in the tour because of the lack of events and tracks. All these events are loads of fun, but most people probably won’t finish the tour due to the fact that it’s the same as DiRT 2. What does the new weather system that gives us snow, blizzards, heavy rain, and more night races really help? It helps give some variety to the tracks, but you will spend a good $30 buying the new tracks and cars, which is a major rip-off and not worth it.
The physics have improved and feel a little less floaty or too heavy. Of course, you can always tune your car if you don’t like the way it drives, but we still can’t customize them, and they even took away the little dash toys to show off the physics engine. I really want to customize my cars, but at least there is a bigger variety in them, and you unlock them at a faster rate. The graphics are phenomenal, and PC users get treated to some DirectX 11 features such as better lighting, shadows, and blur effects. It’s very light, so don’t expect a huge difference, but it lets us PC gamers know we get a little extra.
I also wish those stupid announcers would shut up like they wouldn’t in DiRT 2. They are more annoying now than ever, and I really hate the hip menus Codemasters is doing. What happened to the slick, simple menu of DiRT 1? Besides this, the online modes are fun and not much different from the past two games, except for the addition of Gymkhana. If you loved DiRT 2, pick this up, but newcomers will be amazed at all the greatness.
Need for Speed has taken many different directions in the last decade, but The Run tries to go back to its roots while trying something new. Sure, you’re being chased by cops, doing illegal stuff in a car, having great graphics, and having a super-fast sense of speed. It sounds like an NFS game, right? Well, in a sense, it is, but it won’t change haters’ minds or make hardcore fans happy. This isn’t the true return like Hot Pursuit was, but it does convey a nice idea. You play a guy named Jack Rourke who owes a mob a lot of money. You hear about a race from San Francisco to New York, and your “agent” will give you a cut of the prize money and make your little mob problem go away. You start at the 200th place and make your way to the 1st.
This sounds like it would take forever or be just one straight race, but it isn’t. The game is broken down into 10 stages, and each stage has various races. The terrain obviously changes a lot, and this means lots of different environments to look at, which gets help from EA’s latest Frostbite 2 engine that was used in Battlefield 3. While it doesn’t look as amazing as that game, it looks fantastic and is probably the best-looking NFS game to date. There are so many different places to race—snow, open fields, farms, factories, cities, you name it. There are several different race types, but they are thrown up variously, and the overall experience is repetitive.
Races range from gaining a certain number of positions to battling against the clock in elimination races. There are “boss” races that have you racing a good distance; there are also races solely against the clock to catch up time. That’s about all there is, and the only thing keeping you from getting really bored are the constantly changing environments, which are great to look at, and not one stage is the same. There are some better elements that make the game thrilling, and these are the survival sections. One has you running from an avalanche, another from a helicopter shooting at you, as well as a mountain demolition, but these are so far, and few of you yearn for them between the constant drag of gaining positions.
While these moments are highly entertaining, and probably the moments in the game, a few times Jack will get out of his car and initiate quick time events, which are also entertaining but pretty pointless since you normally don’t play an on-foot NFS game. Don’t worry, you don’t control him; just think of it as an interactive cutscene.
A great NFS game needs fast real-world cars, and there are plenty here, from Ferrari to Lamborghini. You will find them here. You can change cars by pulling into gas stations throughout stages, but overall, you usually stick with one car until the next group is unlocked. You can earn experience through things like drifting, jumping, overtaking cars, etc., but I found this kind of useless since you only earn one thing when leveling up, and it’s usually an avatar or something like that. You can use resets during a race if you crash or really screw up, but watch out; they are limited.
The game features Autolog, which everyone has grown to love, plus there are Challenge Series races to do after you beat the short 4-5 hour campaign mode. Multiplayer is pretty standard and nothing to write home about, but The Run is a fun weekend rental and nothing more. You will quickly forget about this one, but the whole idea is fun while it lasts.
Kart racing games tend to be able to beat the king of them all: Mario Kart. While that game started, all a few entertaining offbeat ones have raced by, but this is Sega’s serious attempt at it, and it works. You can play as almost every major Sega mascot, such as most Sonic characters and familiar faces from Space Channel 5, Super Monkey Ball, and others. You race around tracks that reflect the design and setting of various Sega games while using power-ups to stay ahead of the pack.
The game has a power sliding ability that will increase your boost, which is the key to getting in the first place, but also picking up capsules that hold random power-ups such as a homing missile, mines, shields, speed boosts, and various other power-ups we have seen countless times. The game has a great sense of speed, and sliding around corners and doing various stunts is exciting, but the overall experience is borderline juvenile and very easy, even in the hardest mode. There are various missions you can complete as well as buying characters with Sega Miles, but this only goes so far.
The ideal way to play is with friends, but you need several controllers to do so because there is no online play. Why this was stripped from the PC version beats me, but it really brings down the experience since crowding around one computer isn’t very convenient. Once you do get some friends aboard, the game is a blast, and power-sliding and knocking enemies down makes for great laughs.
But when it’s all said and done, the game is a really average kart racer and has dated graphics as well as some annoying sounds. The game just feels the same no matter what you do as a single player, and I highly doubt anyone over 10 can play all 50+ missions without going crazy. If there was just some online play in here, it could sweeten the deal some, but the single-player can only be tolerated for so long.
This was a year with a lot of driving games and a few didn’t make it on the list. A great driving game has a wide variety of cars, great physics and handling (especially if it’s a simulator), great tracks, and a fun multiplayer component. What sets the best apart from the rest? Perfecting or changing something in the genre that none of the others did. Most racing games tend to stick to what’s safe, but the best reaches out just a little bit further.
What sets DiRT 3 apart this year was the fact that it improved on itself and added a lot of new things, but also was a solid racing game with great physics and cars. This was a close tie against Forza 4, but Forza didn’t improve enough on itself like DiRT 3 did. With the addition of Gymkhana, a whole new presentation style, revamped rep system, and tons of new cars DiRT 3 just new what makes a good racing game. With the addition of some DirectX 11 effects on PC, it also is one of the best looking.
The Driver series has been pretty rocky ever since the first game came out in 1998. The PS1 classic was one of a kind but sparked some bad-to-average sequels. San Francisco is the comeback for the series, and it is very strong and will please fans of the original. The story is kind of weird and takes a supernatural spin, with the lead guy (John Tanner) getting into an accident and falling into a coma after wanted criminal Jericho smashes into his car. Tanner can now leave his body and float around the city, entering any car he wants, and this is what the game is wrapped around.
Most of the game consists of various side missions such as dares, speed chases, races, protecting vehicles, etc. You can leave the car on the fly, move around to any car, and smash into the car you need to take down. This can also be used in races to slow opponents down so you can win, but don’t consider this cheating since most of the races are very challenging. Sometimes you have to swap between two cars constantly and keep them in 1st and 2nd place, which is pretty exhilarating. Or you can just enter cars in oncoming traffic and smash them up to win the race. This can also be done on other various missions, and it’s great fun and never really gets old to take a big rig and smash it into cars to take them out.
However, this all gets old very fast because there are 50+ missions to finish, and as you unlock more of the city, you get more side missions to complete. Dares consist of doing certain things, like drifts, speed limits, jumps, etc. The reason for completing these is willpower, which you can use to buy cars and new garages to unlock more cars. The selection of cars is awesome, with pretty much every popular car you can think of. They even added the DeLorean, and if you hit 88 mph, you get willpower! Driving in first-person view looks great, and the car handles well. Drifting, jumping, and doing crazy stunts are great fun. The city is huge, and you really won’t get bored here during the first half of the game. After the last half picks up, you will be more engaged in the interesting story and probably stop with the side missions because they almost repeat forever.
On another note, the main missions are really interesting, and towards the end of the game, you really get to use your supernatural powers. Overall, the main missions have more diversity than the side missions. The voice acting is great, and the characters are people you actually get interested in because of the drama the story brings you through. While the whole story is hokey, you still get a kick out of being able to veer away from the realistic type of game while keeping it feeling pretty real with awesome licensed cars. You can boost in these cars and unlock a thrill cam, but the boost feels useless at low speeds because it doesn’t boost you at all, and you can’t really use it to boost out of a spin.
Multiplayer is pretty fun, but overall, you will get sick of the game due to the constantly repeated missions, and there’s only so much you can do with a car. I highly recommend this to anyone into cars, action, or just plain old arcade-style racers. If you can stomach the repetitive side missions, or if that’s just what you like, then you will find a good 25+ hour game here with the huge city of Frisco ready to explore.
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Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.