A rarity—a budget racer that looks pretty and drives sublimely. Why then isn't it a great game?
The term "budget game" has taken on a nasty vibe, and there's good reason for it. Too often discount titles simply don't deliver the goods—even when the rock bottom price tag is factored in. They're usually too short, too boring, too ugly, or too flawed. Accordingly, "budget game" has become almost synonymous with "it sucks."
Shows how wrong expectations can be. While L.A. Street Racing—a game about, you guessed it, street racing in Los Angeles—likely won't win any awards, it's far from a clunker. Indeed, one gets the impression that if developer Invictus was able to spend a little more time in the development and testing cycle, fleshing it out and subjecting it to a thorough beta program, L.A. Street Racing could have skipped the budget thing entirely and become a damn good "regular" game.
Unlike games such as Test Drive Unlimited, LASR doesn't allow you to roam freely through your environment searching for likely participants. Instead, you select one of four locations within the city—called "rally points," and often situated outside a supermarket or shopping center—where street racers gather, and simply sit there in your idling car waiting to meet other horsepower-crazed punks. They'll drive up beside you, one at a time, and either offer to race you or hit you up with some unintentionally comedic broken English insult such as "Hey Mr. Honest. If you leave those principles behind you learned in racing school, maybe I'll race you."
This is easily one of the weakest concepts of the entire game, not only because it forces you to endure these oh-so-hurtful verbal zingers, but also because it often compels you to sit through a series of yawningly repetitive insults before someone actually decides to engage you in competition. Once they do, however, things get a bit more interesting.
When you race, you do so to forge ahead in the game's Ranking chart. The better your position, the more chance you have of advancing to the more prestigious rally points—the best being the super way cool "Village Motel"—and battling the elite drivers. The ultimate goal in this strictly two-cars-at-a-time racer is to go head-to-head with Matt Peacock, the head bird in the LA street scene.
But there's more on the line in each event than a better ranking. To make things really interesting, Invictus has also instituted a wagering system whereby the winner walks away with not only the thrill of victory, but also several items from the loser's ride. You don't have to bet, but if you do, you can upgrade your own car with a better muffler, a bigger engine, some new tires, some spiffy ground effects, or maybe some cool racing decals. This is the only way to upgrade your car and thusly the only way to even have a chance of beating the really fast machines.
One of the game's more intriguing wrinkles is that installing a new and theoretically better part doesn't always equate with a faster, superior car. Add a new engine, for example, and your top speed may improve, but your handling and/or acceleration may deteriorate. This is fine if the courses linked to your current rally point have long, high-speed straightaways, but it's less than ideal if you're running tight, twisty tracks. This is an unexpectedly sophisticated concept for a budget game, and one that keeps you from robotically and immediately installing everything you win.
In fact, new parts interact with other parts you've already added. For example, the tranny you won in your most recent race might improve your acceleration when it's installed with a given set of tires, but it may actually detract from your performance when paired with another set. There is, therefore, a fine balancing act. Unfortunately, this "part interaction" doesn't always make sense. This is one of several areas within the game that could have used more development and testing.
Surprisingly, the one area in which the game really and truly excels is the very same area where most budget racers crumble—driving physics. Simply, these cars feel wonderful. They arguably feel better than anything Electronic Arts has ever produced for its Need For Speed series. At the very least, they're more realistic.
Taking a corner in LASR is a joy. You enter the turn from the outside of the track, braking early. You cut to the inside, moderating the throttle and clipping the correct apex, before slowly getting back on the gas and ensuring that your tires grip the road before you gun it again. Failure to do so, and any attempt to adopt an "arcade" driving style, simply won't cut it.
Even on the straightaways, LASR cars feel great. At full speed, the more exotic, faster machines feel substantially lighter than they do at half speed, so much that they're quite capable of temporarily losing contact with the pavement. When they do, you need to be both patient and delicate in order to successfully straighten it out before it swerves or spins. Herky-jerky movements of any sort, at any time, are not recommended. Moreover, failure to hit your shift points perfectly is a strict no-no. Considering the number of non-budget games that just don't get any of this right or don't even attempt such sophistication, LASR's designers are to be congratulated.
The game's damage modeling is admirable. Though it's more than a bit forgiving, damage is visibly and practically confined to the section of the car that took the hit. If, for example, you smack the right quarter panel hard enough, the fender will detach from that side, and you'll feel your car pulling. If you hit a given object just so, your door will pop open and flutter back and forth between open and closed for the rest of the race. Bad accidents can turn a perfectly good car into an undriveable, broken heap, much to the delight of anyone playing the game. Too bad Invictus didn't implement varying degrees of difficulty, because a slightly ramped up LASR damage and physics model might just be enough to please even ultra-hardcore sim drivers.
However, drivers who don't want to play the occasional round of bumper car needn't apply. For starters, the AI drivers are inordinately aggressive creatures that aren't above smacking you over and over again when they get the chance to do so. More critically, the game often forces you into the position of accepting clearly outmatched situations with a far superior opponent. And worse still, these situations present themselves at the most inopportune times, often when you're racing for pink slips.
In times such as these, the only way to win is to bang body parts and hope the enemy emerges worse for wear than you do. It's darned enjoyable, actually, spinning your foe around backward whilst you sail off merrily into the sunset, but when there's a very real chance you'll lose everything you've gained to that point if you're last to the finish line, the system seems at least marginally faulty.
LASR looks better than it probably has a right to considering its price. Granted, it isn't perfect. Headlights blaze into the night from cars parked on the side of the road. Rear view mirrors reflect nothing of importance. Pedestrians and incidental traffic is nonexistent. And the frame rate will suffer when you pile on the detail.
But the races, which occur exclusively at night, feature gorgeous street and scenery lighting and a wide variety of trackside buildings and peripheral items. Sure, much of that scenery looks rather dated, but this is a $20 game after all. Regardless, you'll usually zip by so quickly that you won't notice.
The game's motion blur effect is incredibly overblown but nonetheless exciting, and the interior of each car is both distinctive and detailed. The replay offers a variety of perspectives and a good long look at the somewhat rudimentary yet pretty and reflective surfaces of each automobile. Curiously, that very same replay doesn't recreate the crashes that have occurred—it instead merely shows your car driving through obstacles as if they were ghostly apparitions. Strange indeed.
Online LASR is an erratic experience. The game supports eight-player races, which is a nice change from the strictly two-car single-player format. And there don't appear to be any serious lag issues. However, we've run into several situations where our remote human opponents warp around like crazy, thus rendering the exercise worthless. Ultimately, and as is the case throughout the game, the multiplayer component feels somewhat unfinished. There's no lobby, there's no player-to-player communication, there's no real sophistication to any of the pre-race shenanigans. It is cool to show off your snazziest, most splendidly pimped cars in a public setting, but the fun ends soon thereafter.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved