Speed Racer Preview
By Matt Kelly
About a month back I paid a visit to Warner Brothers Interactive's office, just to drop in and see what was going on. Our contact there and myself sat around in the cafe having a coffee, talking about all the different things WB was up to and of course we hit upon the topic of Speed Racer, both the game and the new film from the Wachowski Brothers. After what I think bored down to fan boy ranting about the franchise, we went up stairs and I had the chance to play a pre release build of the game. There had already been one game play video released and honestly from seeing that I wasn't really expecting much. However it was a pleasant surprise after two multiplayer matches and a single player race to find that the game doesn't complete suck, and purely as a racing game, it's actually pretty fun and intense.
So I came back to Melbourne and set about trying to work out a deal to do this preview. There are a few different reasons we wanted to do this.
-We're Speed Racer fanboys (we have a Lego collection that is steadily growing).
-It's something I know a lot of people are going to be wondering about.
-To date, while the games that the Wachowski Brothers have been involved in aren't the highest rating games, they've normally got some pretty interesting elements in their design, Path of Neo especially.
-And finally, I get very annoyed when something decent cops a whole lot of bad press and comments and always have this urge to do something about it.
So here we are! The game is right around the corner in the US and will ship in June in Australia along side the release of the film. Here's a little peak of whats in store!
Straight up, in terms of the core stuff that should be in a racing game Speed Racer seems to be doing a good job. A lot of issues the Wii racing games come down to controls. They're either too sensitive and you smash into a wall everytime you try and do some minor adjustments, or their so sluggish that it feels like your high performance car should have tank treads and a RPG proof shell. Speed Racer on the other hand was pretty damn natural with it's controls, which is a big plus given the speed of the races and the track design. Making subtle adjustments to the alignment of your car was really smooth, and it was very rare that everything would just go haywire, and normally was due to geeky over excitement. The racing never really grinds to a halt either, thanks to the unique design of the cars. You can spin out but keep travelling, even on your side because the cars work on the idea of four independent wheels. So say Snake Oiler comes up behind you and sends you spinning, you'll still on continue to move while you try and pull your car out of the spin. It's pretty damn cool and throw a bit of a different element into the racing genre, especially with Car-Fu.
Car-Fu is pretty unique to Speed Racer and is where all the movie like action comes from in the game. Flicking the Wii-Remote while holding down a D-Pad button will send your car flipping in a variety of moves to take out other races. Flip forward, land on them, and they're out of the game for a few seconds while you take up the position. There's apparently the whole range of combo moves that can be pulled off that will end with further auto destruction, but didn't get a chance to see. What was really cool was when this was coupled with the four wheel nature of the cars. You can get smashed, spin out and start driving backwards, and then pull a revenge delivering flip into mid air, land on your opponent and take off again.
I only saw one track from the game which was the same that's been in most of the movie's trailers, Thunderhead, the dirty industrial futuristic race track. While the Wii has no hope in hell of matching that kind of detail, Sidhe (the developers) have gone for a much more stylized approach to the tracks using hyper color in ridiculous amounts. What was quite cool though was the track still retained a similar feeling to that of the movie. Presentation is what makes it work rather than graphical detail. The track design itself was really nicely done, allowing all the freedom of high speed and car-fu while still playing like a decent track. I saw a wide array of sections including loops, half pipes and circular tunnels which allow you to drive on the roof.
At this point in time if I could fault anything it would be a simple depth issue. During the second multiplayer match I got locked into trailing our contact at WB with very little chance to pass him. We were both hitting all the Speed boost strips on the track and there just no way a pass was going to happen. Again it's worth mentioning I was playing a development build so car stats, track layouts and all the jazz are still subject to balancing.
I'm not going to say this is the best game off all time but if you're looking for a racing game with a bit of a different flavor, Speed Racer fan or not there's some pretty cool stuff in the game. We'll have a full top to bottom review when it hits in June, along with a chat with the developers soon. Until then rest assured that the game doesn't completely suck.
07/05/2008
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