Split/Second Velocity

Throughout the years, there have been many variations of driving games. From Pole position; Indy car racing; rally games like Colin McRae and the likes of Vigilante 8 with its vehicular warfare. In 2010, Blackrock Studios broke from the norm to make a racing game where you truly use the environment to your advantage. This new Intellectual Property would be known as: Split/Second Velocity.

 

How many times, in racing games, have you been so far ahead that it’s bored you? Alternatively, has someone else been just too far away or just too fast to catch? Have you ever wanted the track to just swallow them up? Or would dropping a building on them suffice? In Split/Second, power plays allow this.

Split Second is nearly a racing game with Michael Bay fans in mind.

The story behind the game, Split/Second Velocity, is that you have been chosen to participate as a competitor in a TV show where you, and your opponents, can trigger environment events to gain an advantage. These events vary from buildings toppling over, cranes swooping and bridges/ shortcuts opening up, to aircraft crash landing and underground routes collapsing. These events are triggered by power plays. Power plays are activated while opponents are close to possible events and you hit the power button. However, there is a currency to play these. To play a power play, you first must have filled your power bars to a certain amount. There are 3 bars which, when filled, enables the bigger power plays. One all three are full, you can either play 3 normal power plays; like a bus flipping over, then a building exploding and whichever other event you wish (perhaps opening a shortcut). However, with a full bar you can play the big ones like; route changers which can critically alter the environment to the extent that the racing track has changed, or nasty plays, like a crash landing aircraft. To earn this ‘power’ you can perform many things. These are: time in the air; drafting cars in front; drifting or narrowly avoiding events aiming to take you out.

 

The above describes the game-play pretty well in the Race mode: Complete the number of laps first. However, there are other modes. Elimination has the same quirks as race, but instead of finishing first, you have to make sure you’re not in last position when the timers reach zero – last one standing wins; These two modes were my favourite and are a sure hit for split-screen. Detonator removes your control of events and throws everything at you as you battle for the fastest time around a track, alone. Survival removes all power plays and pits you against rows of trucks around a repetitive circuit where blue barrels slow you down and red barrels kill you off. The aim is to overtake as many lorries as possible before sudden death or running out of lives, gaining points for each and a multiplier for each consecutive. Air Strike and Air Revenge sits you, again, in a standard Split/Second track but against a helicopter. You must avoid the oncoming missiles. The only difference between these two modes is that Air Revenge re-visits the power-play IP and mixes it up with the ability to divert the missiles back to the helicopter.

 

Onto the graphics: They’re beautiful. At times I can feel that the car models are a tiny bit bland and a hint of the yellow tint used by other games to spruce things up a little. Other than these niggles, when you see the environments crumble, you can tell these were small sacrifices made to ensure the game runs smooth on all platforms. The HUD is by far a stroke of ingenuity. Too many fast paced games were plagued by the player having to dart their eyes around the screen at clutter (Track Mania for one). This isn’t the case for S/SV. The HUD is concise, not in the way but tucked in, where you can see it. The only improvement on this would be to attach the HUD to the car, but this could ruin that you display your trophies on your car, proudly, instead of hiding them away. Sound is an important part for immersion and S/SV has an interesting backing track. When you hear a whoosh as you drive past nearby concaved areas and as cars sweep by – you feel the speed. This adds excitement and breaks up areas of bland travel. Other than this, I love the sound of that aircraft swooping down and obliterating every other pest on the track as it breaks apart along the runway.

The multiplayer feature is nicely integrated into the game, to the point that your online rank is your car number. Oddly enough, the same ranking system that killed Metal Gear Online for me, worked really nice in this game. The once horrid system where you would lose your gained rank if you sucked for a few rounds really heats up the competition. Though when I reached the best rank, rank 1, I stopped playing as I didn’t want to lose my awesome tag. The game-play is fast and furious as docile AI is replaced with competent ‘nasties’ who all want your glory.

Arcade racing games have recently bored me with repetitive nonsense but this game found its way into my PS3 many times and it’s so underrated by people until they actually play it. I love it and I would give it an original 9.5.

One of the only flaws I could think of was that on some tracks, learning most of the power play events would suffice in most single player campaign races if you learned to control the exaggerated car characteristics to fly around at a decent pace, especially with how docile the AI could be at times.