Well I'll be damned. I actually get to preview a game for once. I feel so official now. Anyway, after spending some time with Blur and playing over an hour (that's an hour total playing time, not hour as in real time) I can honestly say that we are in for....yet another ripoff. Mario Kart mixed in with Full Auto pretty much sums up my experience, and yet somehow this mix kicks ass, as long as you have a large group of racers to frag with.
Like Full Auto, you use realistic cars (or in this case actual real life cars) to race to the finish line and shoot others. Like Mario Kart, you can pick up weapons via item box. Like Full Auto, your car can completely wreck, putting you in deep shit. Like Mario Kart, learning how to drift is really important. You see where I'm going with this? As far as the beta goes, you get 8 items to choose from:
Shunt - homing missile
Nitro - take a fuckin guess
Barge - a shockwave taking out anyone near you
Shield - take another guess
Bolt - 3 energy blasts that'll mess with drivers (like green shells)
Repair - ........
Shock - fires 3 EMP fields in front of the race leader
Mine - acts as a landmine; spins racers out
The thing I like about these weapons is that when you get hit, it other feel like the end of the world. They do just enough damage to give the attacker the advantage needed without being too much of a hindrance to the victim. I hope there are more items in the full version, but the ones here are well balanced. The thing I like about item pickups is that they are labeled so you know what you are picking up as oppose to some random drawing decided by the game. Need a shunt? Grab that item box if it shows up. You can hold up to 3 items at once, and you can cycle between them by pressing the X button. If you don't want an item or see something better, you can drop the item you're holding. Wherever you drop it though, other racers can pick it up. This can play into strategy a little bit. If you drop a good item, you can place a mine in front of it. Anybody going for that item, will have to avoid your mine. I've done it twice; it works.
The controls are simple enough. If you played a kart racing game before, you've played this. In terms of driving, I'm not entirely happy with the drifting. I'm not expecting to drift like say Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, but you slow down so much when you do in this game. Speaking of slow-downs, unless someones connection is shitty, the game runs pretty smoothly. Not bad for a beta, especially with up to 20 people racing at once. Like Call of Duty (all of things), you rank up to earn new cars and abilities. In the beta, it caps at 15, but the full version it's said you can reach level 50. I wonder if their will be a prestige mode. Probably called transmission mode or some shit. There's also an arena mode where you can beat the holy hell out of each other. Think of it as a light-hearted Twisted Metal.
It'll be interesting to see how this one turns out, especially in the single-player department. I haven't seen everything in this beta yet, so when I have new info I'll update this post.
[Update]: turns out the rank cap is actually level 10, not 15. Damn; really wanted that Corvette.
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