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R: Racing Evolution Review |
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R: Racing Evolution
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R: Racing Evolution starts out with a beautiful prerendered movie that gives you immediate high expectations for the game. The movie introduces the main character Rena Hayami; an ambulance driver who has such talent that she gets hand picked to become a race car driver by one of the best in the sport. The movie looks good, the plot seems to be a universal favorite, starting from the bottom and working your way up, unfortunately once the actual game starts things stop getting better.
Story mode is usually the first place everyone goes; within story mode there are several types of tracks and vehicles. As you complete races and chapters more tracks and vehicles are unlocked that you can use either in story mode, or other modes of gameplay.
This is one of those hybrid type racing games, where you’ll encounter oval tracks similar to NASCAR, Grand Prix style tracks, and Rally type tracks. The problem is there is a whole mess of good hybrid racing games out there and to make it to the top Evolution was going to need to bring something new to the table. Unfortunately they took a few steps back and actually lack elements that previous games have mastered.
The first thing I noticed right off the bat in the first race was the uneasy vehicle handling, in most racing games there’s a little bit of body roll and resistance when you turn sharp or weave around another car. The vehicles in this game have a real light feel as if there’s no resistance making the line between a sharp turn and a spinout nearly impossible to determine. The same goes when it comes to collisions, whether with another car or a wall there’s something that just isn’t right, a one hundred mile an hour collision results in a little bump and a slight drop in speed. The speed of the game itself even seems to just be really off, what I mean by that is when you take a corner at seventy miles an hour, it looks and feels like you’re going twenty-five.
A couple disappointing notes were the lack of d-pad support and vibration. As far as I’m concerned the most precise and usable control is still in the d-pad and not the analog sticks, leaving pad support out was a sad oversight. The worst part is that the d-pad isn’t even programmed to do anything else, it’s just useless unless you’re out of a race and using it in the menu.
There are a couple things in this game that I personally hadn’t seen in any other racing game on the X-Box. The first is the open communication between competing cars and ability to view the rate of acceleration of your opponents. It’s kind of nice to be able to see how much acceleration and when your opponent is using when you just start playing and need to know how to take certain corners. As for being able to hear your opponents talking, well that gets kind of silly and annoying when they’re trash talking you half a lap behind.
The second new aspect I noticed was breaking assistance. Break assistance is for a true beginner who probably has little to no experience playing any racing games. The game will just automatically apply the break the proper distance from the turn to make it easy for what would probably be younger players. Unfortunately the computer isn’t really all that good at determining the distance to the turn and how much it should slow down, when I was messing around with the assisted breaking my car was constantly breaking too hard and running into the wall I was trying to turn around.
I’m guessing anyone who has played a racing game before can dispose of story mode in about two hours, after that there’s not much use playing unless you want to play vs. mode with a friend or try and get a fast time on the time trial tracks. My advice to you would be that this game is probably more suitable for younger players (under 10) who can take advantage of breaking assistance; anyone who is older and a fan of racing games would just become frustrated playing this.
Visit the official R:Racing Evolution website here.
Review By: Travis Parrott
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