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Impact Racing (Saturn) review"Impact Racing could have turned out to be a decent, combat racing title. Yes, decent. Unfortunately, it fails because it's too demanding at what it tries to do. The concept's interesting: make everything revolve around destroying cars. Need weapons? Destroy a car. Extra time? Destroy a car. Health? Car go boom. It really doesn't sound like much of a big deal, and it's not at the beginning. So, for the first two or so levels, your main concentration goes to making it to the bonus stages fo..." |
Impact Racing could have turned out to be a decent, combat racing title. Yes, decent. Unfortunately, it fails because it's too demanding at what it tries to do. The concept's interesting: make everything revolve around destroying cars. Need weapons? Destroy a car. Extra time? Destroy a car. Health? Car go boom. It really doesn't sound like much of a big deal, and it's not at the beginning. So, for the first two or so levels, your main concentration goes to making it to the bonus stages for a chance at winning a handy upgrade for your car. And you make it there by, of course, destroying a set number of cars.
Now, fast forward to around the third or fourth level, and that's where things start to get really annoying. Your car has a few upgrades that makes destroying cars much easier, but so do your opponents, and they're pretty aggressive about it as well. This eventually triggers a typical racing scenario in IR. You really can't go no more than five seconds without being attacked by half a dozen mines, get bumped from behind by a car, dodge trails of fire, and even some missiles. Dodging won't be easy, because the track is so narrow that you'll end up bumping into the sides every two seconds.
This brings you to your energy, or lack of it. With all the hits your vehicle is taking, you're gonna need to pick up some health from the cars that's destroying you. Of course, you're gonna have to waste a lot of your ammunition on your opponents in a desperate attempt to get some. Unfortunately for you, time is also running low at the moment, so, every time you destroy a vehicle, instead of receiving a health pack, you end up getting a time pack. Well, if you can catch it as you zoom towards it at 190 mph, that is. If not, then, well, that just leaves you with a defenseless car on the verge of blowing up, unless the time runs out before that happens.
Welcome to Impact Racing.
To make matters worse, there's a total of 13 tracks of this crap. And you know what? There's only three actual tracks, with slight variations (you get to drive at night! WOW!) as you repeat them over and over again. I've only described the gameplay aspects so far, IR assaults you on the sound and visual fronts as well. For the entire game, all you'll ever hear is a ton of horrible sounding techno and dance music. If for some insane reason you end up playing this title, turn off the music before you start the game. It's a shame you can't do the same for the graphics. One thing I'll give the horrible gameplay credit for, it keeps you too busy to even notice how butt-ugly the visuals are at first. Sadly, that's probably the only great thing about Impact Racing.
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