007 Racing

The first thing I have to mention is the fact that this game was made in the year 2000. Why do I bring this up you ask? I’ll tell you why – this thing has first-generation graphics. The graphics are grainy. There’s pop-up everywhere. And there’s warping of already muddy textures when the scene rotates, which is often. I honestly got a headache playing this game after about an hour.

Or maybe my headache was caused by the poor controls and frustrating gameplay. The control setup is fairly consistent with Twisted Metal’s, but just try driving the car. Turn for about a second and you’ll find yourself over-steering…already. Not only is the steering a little touchy but the weapons interface is hassle to deal with too. When you drive over a new weapon, the game switches to what you just picked up, so if you’re in a real hectic situation and all of a sudden, you pick up a new weapon you don’t need, you’re basically screwed because you have to cycle through the weapons one by one. By that time, the enemies are eating into your health. Another area that needs help is aiming, especially with missiles. Since the missiles are launched from the sides of the car in alternating fashion (first from the left, second from the right, etc.), it’s hard to aim a long-range shot.

These poor controls add further to the difficult and frustrating gameplay. Take for example the “Ambush” stage. The first objective is to “destroy all cars involved in the ambush”. For the most part, the cars are always chasing you in a very confined stage, and pulling a power-slide so that you can face the cars to destroy is next to impossible. The rest of the stage, and some of the later missions, is just as frustrating as that.

Now, imagine this. You’ve just beaten a mission that you’ve spent more than an hour on because it’s frustrating and you breathe a sign a relief. Then, you slam your controller into the floor because you just found out that you failed to meet the minimum scoring requirement. I found myself using the entire cursing dictionary by the time I had reached the third mission.

The multiplayer isn’t all that impressive either. There are two modes – Deathmatch and Pass the Bomb. Deathmatch is basically a Twisted Metal rip-off. Pass the Bomb is exactly what it says – you play tag and whoever has the bomb is “it”. The catch is that the “it” has a timer attached to it and when the timer hits zero – boom all gone. The multiplayer would have been more fun if the controls were tighter and more than two people could play.

One last little picky thing to add is about the voiceovers during the game itself. The voices during the CG sequences are great, but while you’re playing the game, it’s really annoying having to hear Q repeat the same 4 or so whiny lines over and over again.