Smash Cars Review

I never really did much RC racing as a child. Anything with a remote and wheels was usually reserved for chasing my cat down. Metro3D’s Smash Cars is helping me find my lost childhood in a small little package of gaming goodness. Despite a few minor flaws, Smash Cars has a lot to offer.

In Smash Cars, you control a small RC car and battle it out in a series of races against the CPU in the championship mode. Don’t think that this will be a cake-series of circular track races though; Smash Cars features a number of different tracks and gameplay modes to keep your thumbs swaying and fingers tapping

Standard "cup" races will see you battle against five CPU opponents in a series of three to five laps through a series of checkpoints. These tracks will take you to various locations like the swamps of the bayou, sunny Cuba, and the busy roads near the Yellow River. Smash Races are a simplified version of the standard cup matches. These maps feature only two checkpoints and you can choose which route to take, clockwise or counterclockwise. It doesn’t matter which way you choose because either way you’ll be meeting your opponents head on; which is good since you get bonus points for smashing into them. The Hot Pot races make laps irrelevant and see you on a quest to find hidden plutonium barrels that are hidden secretly around the map; collect a certain number before time runs out and you win. The Dark Horse races are one of the more fun modes. Your objective isn’t to win but to ensure another racer (Dark Horse) comes out on top. To do this you have to shadow him and take out any car that gets ahead of him, effectively smashing the competition. The last gameplay mode to mention is the Stunt Race. In these you’ll battle the CPU to see who can throw the sickest tricks out on the track. To score points you complete complex jumps and tricks within your allotted time. The person with the most points at the end wins.

The maps themselves are fully interactive. While you race through the various levels you’ll have to contend with wild animals that will snap you up in their jaws and throw your car off course; over-zealous security guards that will shoot your car to smithereens; even beach-going vacationers will take the time to pick you up and throw you in the ocean if you get too close. While all these are fun elements the maps tend to suffer from a little too much detail at times. Some maps are impossibly difficult the first few times you play through them because you aren’t yet familiar with the map maker’s placement of rocks and other objects which will send you wildly off course and in the wrong direction. One small bump by a pebble and you’ll find yourself flying off a boardwalk and 20 seconds behind where you just were. Once you’ve played through a map several times though you will learn the quirks and the shortcuts of each map which makes the game a lot less frustrating.

Unfortunately, the entire trick system, and ultimately the stunt races themselves, seem a bit lack luster. Your only option is to achieve some air and then steer the control stick to do a barrel roll or a flip. The more you do of each while in mid-air the more points you get if you successfully land the car. Sometimes the best airtimes can happen by pure luck. Because the CPU is significantly more efficient in doing tricks than you the stunt races seem like a burden to perform. Throughout the stunt race tracks there are special "5x" and "2x" markers which boost your points accordingly. Without these and without the placement of special point markers, which instantly move your score up by 500, you wouldn’t normally stand a chance. More often than not I spent my time in the stunt races concentrating on getting the 500 bonus points more than I was completing the actual stunts. In the other modes, the cash reward for successfully doing stunts didn’t warrant the risk it took to perform them if you should wipe out and lose the lead. I’d rather have 1st place and the $100 winner’s pot than 5th place and $5 for doing a flip.

Before each race you’ll choose your racer and even have a limited say in the paint job it has too. In addition to the basic four vehicles you start out with you will unlock several cars in the championship mode by completing certain races. The cars are rated on three different performance plateaus; stunt ability, top speed, and acceleration. Each car also has a certain number of upgrades it can receive on its booster, tires, and engine. You can purchase these upgrades in the garage with the money you earn winning races. Better engines increase your acceleration and speed, tire upgrades make you more stable and allow you to perform better turns, and the boost upgrade will allow you to go faster on your boost and receive more boost in your booster gauge whenever you pass through a checkpoint or hit an object or opponent.

Graphically, Smash Cars is a polarized title. The cars have a lot of detail rendered into them and look very slick. Objects on the maps tend to suffer from less detail and look more generic with less-textured surfaces. This is especially apparent on the humans that dwell on the map and even in the "real cars" that roll along the roads. There weren’t any noticeable frame-rate drops during gameplay which is impressive given the amount of action that can appear on the screen at any given moment.

The controls in Smash Cars are fairly straightforward. You use the left joystick to steer your vehicle and there are buttons for acceleration, braking and reversing, resetting your car, and there’s even a hand brake for good measure. Jumping and boosters are controlled by the right and left shoulder buttons respectively. Most of the cars control really well and they are all responsive however a few of the vehicles actually feel sluggish at times. This makes racing them a frustrating ordeal when perfection and accuracy to turns are a key to winning some races.

There isn’t much to the sound in Smash Cars. Besides the sound of your little RC engine and the grinding crashes of plastic-on-plastic racing action there isn’t much to the game. There are a few techno songs that play repetitively during the races but these tend to get old fast. I was either turning the volume off all together or drowning it out with some nice choice selections from my stereo. Nothing screams racing victory like a little Highway to h**.

Multiplayer supports up to two players and is handled via split-screen. It can be difficult getting your bearings on the maps and anticipating certain turns but it provides an excellent addition when you’re tired of going against the CPU opponents.

When it all comes down to it, Smash Cars is a fantastic game with a lot to offer racing fans. What it gives in its multiple gameplay modes far outweighs what few shortfalls it has. Any fan of fast-paced racing titles should pick this up.