Split/Second

OH MY GOD THIS GAME IS ACTUALLY HARD.

Really. It can be really frustrating. And I'm not just talking about the rubber band AI, which has to be the most annoying racing AI ever. If you're out in front, the other cars will catch up to you. They just will. Guaranteed. But you can be stuck a couple seconds behind the car in 1st place for the whole damn race unless you use the power plays. And you'll soon run out of them if the other car is out of drafting distance.

The other main way of getting power is drifting, but seriously, you do not want to be drifting. Ever. It completely kills your speed. If you're in 2nd and you drift to get some power to take out the guy in 1st, by the time you're out of the corner you'll be in 4th place. Especially in the Elite race. Those are twice as hard.

And that's just normal races. Elimination mode is a real squeeze, since the car in last place is eliminated every 20 seconds. The other modes I've unlocked so far are Detonator and Air Strike. Both challenging. Well, the Detonator event wasn't, but it was only the first one.

Detonator is basically a time trial. You have to do one lap of the track in a certain amount of time, while the power plays are triggered automatically as you approach. So you have to dodge all the crap flying at you and race perfectly to beat the time limit.

Air Strike is a fun side-mode, where a helicopter flies along track ahead of you, firing waves of missiles at you, and you have to dodge them. You have to beat a certain score to win the event, and the more you dodge the better. Each wave of missiles is more numerous than the last, and the game forces you to keep the speed up because the faster you're going to more spread out the missiles are and the easier it is to dodge them. If you slow down they all cluster together and it's a bitch to avoid.

The big power plays are nice too. One thing I noticed that was different from the demo is that when you trigger a level 2 power play, the music cuts out just before the impact. It can really add to the tension of a race, especially a new a track where you have no idea what the power play is going to do.

The little symbol comes up and you just press it, and suddenly a ferry is crashing into the dock that you're racing on, or a tunnel collapses creating a ramp which launches you onto an aircraft carrier. I like it.

The insane AI can be annoying though. I get the feeling it was made it was made that way so that using power plays was a much more essential part of the game, since if you could just out race the other cars they would be a bit redundant.

The general destruction seems better than in the demo too. A lot of times in the demo when a car got wrecked it would often just stop dead and it wouldn't be very interesting. Now more often than not when hit by a power play they swerve into a wall and flip and break and the wreckage tumbles down the track alongside you as you plow through it.

Cool, I might pick his up......After a bit.

when i heard you mention rubber band ai the first time i was a bit suspect it still sounds fun though, how are crashes into walls handled they seemed dodgy on the demo

All the effects look a bit better than they did in the demo. The course changes look a bit better, since the building destructions look like they have a few more parts to them. n the demo when the control tower came down, it just kind of fell into place, whereas it looks a bit more crumbly and random in the demo.

Car destruction is more lively too, however it happens. In demo they looked a bit like those crash test dummy toy cars, just breaking into three big bits and then stopping.

The track from the demo has a slightly different colour palette too. More blue than orange now.

Just unlocked survival mode. There's loads on massive trucks driving along the track with you, dropping barrels out the back of them. Some are blue and some are red. The red comes wreck you if you hit them. You have to dodge the barrels and overtake the trucks to build your score. There's also loads of a dummy cars racing as well, which seem programmed to just smash right into the barrels so there's always lots of wreckage going on.

Just realised this game applies adaptive difficulty across events as well as rubber band AI within individual races. If you fuck up a race a few times, the games seems to ease up on you a bit and basically give you a freebie. An Elite Race was giving me trouble (those things are bloody rigged, they have to be), but then at one point the game just let me get miles ahead and stay there, with no other cars catching up.

It's really damn annoying when the AI can get so far ahead of you that you're literally helpless. It's impossible to catch up sometimes, and you can't use power plays because you can't even see them.

How does the split screen mode play?

I dunno. I only have one controller. It's only for 2 player though, not 4 player. And you can choose which way to split the screen.

1 controller?

don't you even play with your sister?

I don't live with my sisters.

No friends nearby?

I always considered gaming a social thing not online though cause that sucks, except when I play with you guys, which is way more fun.

Only friend that lives close by is a 360 guy, plus if there's any social gaming going on, it'll be at his place because he has a massive TV.

Unlocked the last game mode, Air Revenge. Like Air Strike, except dodging the missiles earns you power which you can use to deflect the missiles back at the chopper. You have to bring it down within a certain amount of time.

oh right that makes sense

one thing that impresses me about this game is the multitude of events

Air Revenge seems a bit pointless really. It's just Air Strike, but shorter, because it's over when you take the chopper out. Survival is just a reskinned Air Strike as well, where it's trucks dumping explosive barrels rather than a chopper firing missiles. It has it's own charms, but I like Air Strike more because Air Strike takes place on the actual tracks. Survival has it's own smaller tracks that aren't very interesting.

Race, Detonator and Elimination are fairly standard racing modes.

This game seems to be getting a bit easier now that I'm unlocking some better cars. Tried the online too. Main thing I noticed was that power builds up at about half the speed as it does offline, so it's not quite as power play dependent.

Also, despite the game telling you that different cars are suited for different events and stuff, most of the cars are useless. You're best off just picking the car with the best speed, acceleration and handling, and forgetting about strength. A good speed-based car will get you through any event just fine.

Part of the reason the Detonator events in Season mode are so hard is because they give you a specific car, and it's usually not a very good one. The latest one I'm trying, the car corners like a brick, but it drifts like a damn ice cube. You can hold left forever and it will just go in a big wide slow circle at full throttle, but touch the brakes and it'll turn on a fucking penny.

Holy shit sometimes this game just sucks all the satisfaction out of winning. I was trying an elite race for ages, and always finishing 2nd or 3rd by a good distance. And then the time when I won, I got ahead in the first lap and never saw any of the cars again. It's like the game just said "Wow, you're pretty shit at this. Here, let me make it easier for you."

Oh thats a real shame

i'm still not sure about buying this, i'm hoping game does some weird ass price crash

they seem to be panic selling these days

That's a rare thing though. Happened to me twice so far.

I bought this for a tenner on the Plus sale. One of the DLC things was going free too, which a new car and mode, so I grabbed that. Traded this in ages ago and I can't remember why. Once my new HDD is in place I'll actually download it.

This is as fun and annoying as I remember. Good deal for £10 and a free DLC mode. Although the mode is basically a copy of one of the existing modes. Deadline is just Detonator, but rather than the time counting up, it counts down and you hit little marks to extend the time. If you drive into them the clock stops for half a second, but if you drift into them it stops for 2 seconds.

Actually this game is more annoying than I remember. I realised what the other cars in Survival mode are actually for. They're there to explode in your face so you can't see what's in front of you and make you crash.