XBLA:Mad Tracks

Having just finished the Mad Tracks free trial, I have very mixed feeling about it. First of all, if you DO play it, save yourself the heartache. DO NOT PLAY ON EASY. It really is easy, with your CPU rivals being forced to go slower than you. You have nothing to aim at :P

In the mean time, lets take a look at the graphics. Starting with the menu, there is nothing impressive. Okay, so there IS a definite sense of theme going on with the whole thing. The only problem is that the only animation you'll find on the menus is that seemingly customary 'Press A to Start' screen, where the text will pulse a little. Other than that, it's just plain cuts from one screen to another, the old content disappearing, only to be replaced by the new content. This may have been acceptable back in the Olde Days but I do like to think that we have moved on since then.

In-game, the graphics are passable. The cubemaps on the cars are, unfortunately, quite static, unlike the shiny reflective cubemaps of PGR3. "This is hardly PGR3 now, is it Gleeb?" I hear you say, and you're right, it ain't, but rendering out cubemaps is an old technique, many years old, in fact. With the XBox360, we can now afford to render a cube map for each car, paint it on there and get nice shiny cars. Add to this the use of ambient shadow rendering for the cars, despite the fact that the restaurant level HAS no proper ambient light, and you're heading to some bad times. The less said about the static lightmaps, the better.

However, trying to be objective about the graphics style, you must also look at the art side of the coin, and I must say that other than some of the model being pretty low-poly, even for XBLA, and the textures being low quality (which can be forgiven, seeing as the plethora of content was squeezed into 50mb) the are style is solid and very much so.

Onto the gameplay. I did at first think that the physics and therefore the whole gameplay system was broken, but as soon as I put the car AI onto 'Hard', the enemies became a half-decent callenge and I was having great fun with this. I can see this game being very fun in multiplayer... of only I had someone to play it with in this hideous, 4:3 hating split-screen mode, I could tell you.

Unfortunatly, if there is one place that this game really lets me down, it's in sound design. Not a SINGLE sound in the whole game loops properly. NOT A ONE. Not even the music, which fades out and in again at the loop point to 'disguise' this particular failing.

All in all, it's a take-it-or-leave-it game, and I've decided to leave it. Back to Boom Boom Rocket.