First of all this is a 2007 title and it look’s like it, not that that necessarily means that it’s completely bad. I’ve ‘played’ it for around an hour and 45 minutes. I say ‘played’ because I spent I most of my time in the menu trying to figure out how to start playing the game, the game decides not to work half the time. I was eventually able to complete a whole match which I enjoyed.
- If you aren’t a really patient person, don’t a lot of time on your hands and don’t like turn based games you should probably skip this
- You actually control your vehicles movement by using manipulating the steering wheel and with the physics your car can spin out of control, I thought that was really cool
http://youtu.be/zTG_6Tv9VsUhttp://youtu.be/hQxOhW8nMn8So at first I had no problem getting into the a couple of tutorial matches, You just need to click on the big tutorial button in the middle of the menu. The tutorial tips missed certain points like the fact that you need to destroy the car on the other side of the map to end the first tutorial. Also after my three attempts at completing the tutorials I initially couldn’t get into them again even though in the menu I was told that the tutorial would be starting.
-----I thought the way you control your car is cool. It took me a while to work it out. You don’t actually just click where you want your vehicle to go. You actually need to change the position of a steering wheel and throttle by dragging them with the mouse or using the arrows keys. So it’s sort of like a simulation of real controls. The game indicates where your car will move to after you end your turn. When you end your turn a few seconds will pass and the vehicles move, a little bit… lol. You have to complete a lot of turns in order to cover substantial distances, because vehicles will only progress bit by bit. You will need to adjust your throttle and steering most turns in order to avoid hazards or losing control and to navigate the environment.
-----I thought this was really cool. Your car will spin out of control if you just lock the steering wheel and max out the throttle, and stuff like that. I think going inclines can cause your car to flip too, I didn’t put that to the test yet. You can also drift and go over jumps.
-----Vehicles will have different guns equipped depending on their model, I think you can also customize the loadout. Guns can be on the front, back or sides of vehicles. Drivers only appear to be able to fire front guns. But you are able to have passengers gunning weapons in the other locations.
-----I had to figure out how to use weapons, I didn’t see any instructions. You have to fiddle around a fair bit. You need to open the management tab found to above of the throttle and steering wheel controls. Click on the weapon then the occupant you wish to assign as the gunner. If you can’t assign a gunner to a weapon it may be because it’s a melee weapon used for ramming. If it is a projectile weapon click on the weapon in the management tab again to see the firing arc and select a target by left clicking it. Then after one turn you will have the option to set the weapon to fire one time only or every turn until you say so. The weapon will fire when it’s target is in it’s firing arc, which may require many turns of repositioning to achieve.
-----So that’s what I did for the first 20-30 minutes, the tutorials. So then I wanted to get stuck into the game, I wasn’t sure how it worked. I thought it would be like an open world but you actually just appear to join events such as death-races or arena combat. I think there is actually on foot combat events for you gang members as well as vehicular combat. The game makes reference to a number of towns but I have no idea how this all works i.e. how you go to them.
-----I was initially very confused about how to actually join one of these matches, it probably didn’t help that I was tired. Anyway what you are supposed to do is click on an upcoming event, the list is pretty much in the middle of the main menu. Sometimes nothing happened when I did this, which is one of the reasons I had so much trouble getting into a match. I think this might have been because of connection or server, sometimes I was disconnected without realizing it. There is no connection status indicator or sound played on disconnect and and it’s easy to miss server messages with all the chat going on. Clicking login seemed to fix this problem sometimes. Unfortunately doing so while you actually already have a connection will kick you and make you wait 30 seconds until you can reconnect.
-----Anyway if things are working properly, clicking on an event in the list should bring up a menu. Click register and then then scroll down and click register again. This should add you to the list of competitors. In each match that I joined everyone seemed to be given a stock car. Once the countdown timer has reached about 3 minutes you will be able to enter the event by clicking play game in the same window. You can leave this window before this but you may have trouble finding it again if there are different events with similar names. For some reason a lot of events have very long countdown timers, sometimes over an hour. You will probably want to choose one that has only a few minutes to wait.
-----I have successfully joined and completed one ‘race’. There were initially two other player controlled vehicles. The other ten vehicles or so were AI controlled. Every human player needs to repeatedly end their turn in order for the game to progress, otherwise you can be sitting there waiting forever. I think all players were first timers like me. All the vehicles literally gradually inched along as the players locked in their turns. Although it was a race surprising at like turn 28 half way through the first lap, weapons went hot. So missiles began flying everywhere, but everyone quickly ran out of ammo. After around half an hour and I think about 150 turns, I think I came 5th which should have earned me a reward. But my car just disappeared and I returned to menu before the last cars finished. I didn’t see a results screen. I later joined a combat arena match but for some reason I was disconnected.
-----You can buy and sell vehicles and items from NPCs and other players. I didn’t do anything with that, it doesn’t seem to be necessary for a new player.
-----I started with five gang members. They crew you vehicles and have different stats making each of them suited to specific roles including driving and gunning. Again I haven’t played for long enough to see how this affects the game. I just allowed gang members to automatically be assigned to positions in my vehicles.
-----There is also what look's like some form of scenario editor which I didn't really get a chance to look at properly.
So yes the game has 2007 graphics. But honestly they do the job. The textures are pretty basic, but the physics are cool. The cars bounce around on their suspension when they go over uneven terrain etc.
-----The main problem is really with the interface in the menu. There is no indication when you are disconnected from the server. There is no status indicator for events that you have requested or registered for once you have left the event registration window.
So yeah they game is old but I don’t really care about the graphics. I actually really wanted to get stuck into the gameplay because I liked it. But with server issues and stuff the game just made it hard for me to actually play it. If you can join events with friends, I would like to do that. But I’m not even sure that you can at this stage. If I can get the game to work reliably I think I would like to spend more time playing it.
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