 Review By: Jared Black |
Developer: | Genki |
| Publisher: | Crave Entertainment | |
| Genre: | Racing | |
| ESRB: | Everyone | |
| # Of Players: | 1-2 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | Memory Card | |
| Buy Now: |   |
The most recent entry in the Tokyo Xtreme Racer (TXR) series, Street Supremacy, was not a good game. Although that game featured a compelling career mode that saw players fighting it out for turf with rival racing gangs, cars that steered like bricks, insane load times, and mediocre sound and graphics weighed it down.
Hoping to cash in on the drifting craze sweeping the racing genre of late, Genki’s latest entry in the Tokyo Xtreme Racer series takes it out of those night streets and into the scenic mountainside. Unfortunately, it also brings the same general racing mechanics as Street Supremacy with it, and throws in a clunky drifting system and slow as molasses career mode for good measure. The result is a racing game that’s broken on nearly every level.
Like all Genki racers (I’ve ever played anyway), in the beginning you start out with very limited funding. As a result, you’re forced to purchase one of several bargain basement real-life vehicles. Unfortunately, whereas these cars were serviceable in the past, this time around they’re extremely limited. In the beginning, the upgrade system is a brutal grind that feels more like work than play. The game is broken up into day and night sections, with the daytime primarily used for category races (wherein you earn points to purchase upgrades) and purchasing car upgrades, while the nighttime serves as a chance to face some real competition in one-on-one duels.
The problem is that your car won’t come close to competing with even the worst racers at night in the beginning, so for the first week or two of in-game time I was forced to run category races almost exclusively. These are basically untimed events in which you try to earn a certain amount of points by pulling off drifts in marked drifting zones. The higher you score, the more money you earn to purchase car upgrades. However, only three different events are available in the beginning, so you’re basically forced to run these same events over and over again until you can start winning night races and unlocking additional category races during the daytime. Unfortunately you must win all three initial category races before you unlock extras, so if you happen to get stuck on one (as I did) you won’t unlock anything else to race no matter how often you beat the other two. Unless of course the one I was stuck on happened to be the one that unlocked the next set, but still the point stands. I don’t know about you, but I find running small chunks of courses over and over again by myself, pulling off the exact same drifts each time, with extremely slow cars to be pretty boring.
Things start to pick up a bit once you’re able to win a few one-on-one races. Just like in previous TXR titles, these play out in almost fighting game fashion. Each car has a spirit meter, which will drop as a car falls behind or bangs into a wall. If that meter reaches zero, the race is automatically over and the opponent is declared the winner. In this game however, races can also be decided simply by whoever crosses the finish line first. Since Genki didn’t build an entire simulated city for you to drive around this time out adding an actual finish line was a necessary change, but it does take away some of the drama found in past titles where the spirit meter was the sole determining factor in the outcome of a race.
So we already know that the setup of the game’s career mode is a chore, but unfortunately the feel of controlling the cars only makes things worse. There’s absolutely no sense of speed in the beginning, and very little even after you start upgrading to better parts and cars. As frustrating as that is, what’s worse is that almost every car handles like an 18-wheeler. Taking turns at relatively low speeds is much harder than it should be, and the cars steer like they’re anchored down in the back with the front-end often swinging left or right while the back remains firmly in place.
Compounding this problem is the drift system. While the actual drifting isn’t terrible (fairly similar to Ridge Racer), it almost always feels either a little too touchy or not responsive enough. That I can get used to, and honestly didn’t really bother me after the first few races when I started adjusting to it. What does bother me though is how drifting is implemented in the game. To begin with, you can only drift for points (and consequently earn money to upgrade parts or purchase new cars) in certain marked zones. Even if a course has curves in which drifting is possible, if they aren’t specifically marked as drifting zones any done there is worthless. I don’t understand this at all; the whole point of doing stunts like drifting is to show off and look cool, yet it only matters if I do it in predetermined areas? It’s not like allowing the player to earn points while drifting anywhere would’ve totally thrown the whole game’s balance off either, as the points needed to achieve certain bonuses could easily have be adjusted.
Aside from that, the game further reduces the effectiveness of drifting by dishing out huge penalties anytime a wall is touched or the player drives the wrong way on the track. So if you pull off a perfect drift throughout an entire drift zone, then barely tap the wall at the end, it will wipe out all of the points earned in the previous drift before it. If you tap the wall at the beginning of a zone, it will negate any points earned for the entire zone. Not only is this a pointless deduction to begin with, but also in essence the game is actively discouraging the player from taking any risks by making the walls a kiss of death.
Same goes for driving the wrong way; if the car goes the wrong way at any point during a run (whether it be in reverse facing forward, or in drive facing backwards), all of the points the player has earned up to that point will begin draining rapidly. And I mean extremely rapidly, so that an entire run’s worth of points can be wiped out in mere seconds. I understand this penalty a little more than the wall one since it does discourage the player from doing donuts (a lame way to earn big drift points early on), but it takes away points much too quickly. Even worse is that despite it, it’s still pretty easy to “cheat” the system. If you do a donut and end up facing the wrong way, simply put the car in reverse until you can straighten it up while facing neither forward nor backward (in other words across the track). Then gently ease the car forward while turning sharply and no penalty points will be assessed since the car never technically went the wrong way.
Graphically the game fails to impress. Car and track designs are minimalist, and definitely have a budget feel to them with blocky models and simplistic texturing. Courses are also pretty boxed in, so there’s not a lot to look at outside of the track itself. At least the menus are nice though.
Sound wise the game doesn’t really do anything either, with average engine sounds and virtually no ambient noises. The soundtrack is pretty nice though, with a nice eclectic mix of country, rock, and jazz. Sure it’s all generic in nature, but it sounds pretty good and this is a budget title.
Bottom Line:
It’s sad to see how far this franchise has fallen. In this installment all of the pieces are in place to make a good racer, but horrible implementation throughout dooms it to mediocrity. Decent upgrade system and budget price notwithstanding, I can’t recommend paying for a game that’s such a chore to play.
Genki, please just stop with the gimmicks and punishing gameplay. Get back to basics, and recapture the magic that made the original Dreamcast version such a hit. It’s not too late to save this once-proud franchise.
| Pros: | Cons: | Final Score: |
|---|---|---|
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| 3.5 |
Posted: 2006-07-05 19:55:07 PST