When it came time to play Off Road, a Ford & Land Rover-branded racing game from Empire Interactive, Xplosiv, and Razorworks, my biggest concern was the level of realism involved. When it comes to racing games, I distinctly prefer an arcade experience over a simulation. I’m not saying Gran Turismo or Forza are bad games by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ll take a game like Burnout, Daytona, or even Mario Kart every time. So, I was worried when Off Road loaded up and started showing off its vehicle selection — all Ford and Land Rover vehicles, modelled after their real-life 2008 counterparts. I quickly discovered, however, that I had worried for nothing: Off Road may have a selection of real-life vehicles, but it is nowhere near a simulation game. Ultra-simple controls and forgiving physics give Off Road a definite arcade flavor… it’s a shame, however, that that flavor is a little on the bland side.
I played Off Road on the PC, though it’s also been released for the PS2, PSP, and Wii. This combination of systems more or less spells out the visuals you can expect from Off Road; don’t expect a stunningly-rendered high-definition experience. What’s there is passable — the trucks are all modeled well, if a little on the low-polygon-count side, textures are distinct enough, the vehicles have reflective surfaces, and the lighting actually manages some impressive bloom effects when you crest a hill and start driving into the sun. There’s even a moment when you’re racing down a riverbed and a waterfall comes into view, presenting a very picturesque scene for you to race past at 80mph. The rest, though, is run-of-the-mill stuff. Late 1990s dust and smoke effects, the vehicle models barely show damage, and the majority of the racetracks’ only major variety is a collection of two-dimensional, non-interactive sprites (e.g. scrub and bushes). On the plus side, the game has some decent audio to it. The sound effects are your standard “revving engine” fare, but the generic-rock background music is catchy. It reminded me right away of the Uniracers soundtrack, which I rather enjoyed. It could stand to have a few more tracks, though; they start looping pretty quickly.
Off Road’s gameplay isn’t bad. The game will accept keyboard input, or any gaming peripheral you want to throw at it — a gamepad or driving wheel is easily linked to the game through the configuration utility, providing fully analog control. Piloting your truck is a simple, arcade-easy affair. You’ve got gas, brakes, e-brake, and steering. That’s it — you don’t even shift gears. The controls, as mentioned earlier, are forgiving and simple: despite the dirt and sand roads, you’ll never fishtail more than slightly, the e-brake will let you drift around turns even in massively heavy SUVs, and walls & obstacles won’t ever present more than a minor slowdown — you shouldn’t have to worry about finding yourself at a dead stop, facing the wrong way.
Realists will be deeply disappointed by Off Road, for the game emphasizes fast and easy racing over expert turning and finding those perfect lines. There really seems to be no difference between racing on the road or off it; I was able to plow directly through clumps of desert weeds, taller than my truck, with no effect or consequence. Drifting is possible in even the most top-heavy SUV. The trucks take damage, but only via a nebulous “damage meter,” whose effect seems to be the artificial dampening of your top speed & handling, and whose reasons for filling are fairly arbitrary. Grinding for a few seconds against a fellow racer can fill your damage meter nearly to capacity, but plowing into a massive boulder at 90mph? The game is happy to let you off with a warning. These aren’t bad things, per se, it’s just important to accept them and understand this is the sort of game you’re dealing with. If you want realism, pick up Gran Turismo. Off Road, comparatively, is the type of game anyone can pick up and play instantly.
The flip side to this, unfortunately, is that there isn’t a whole lot to the game once you’ve been through a few races. My first race, getting used to the handling, I placed 3rd out of 6 trucks, and from there on out, I was coming in 1st, again and again — often finishing more than half a lap ahead of the pack. The game’s tracks do start to get a little trickier, but never by that much, and though the game promises 24 tracks, it’s counting the fact that you can race 12 different tracks both forward and backward, so the variety does start to wear thin after a while. There isn’t much strategy in picking the cars, either: Rather than providing a selection of different vehicles where one has to choose between speed or handling, there’s merely a list of trucks which just get better and better. They’re unlocked in the game’s “career” mode, and you simply start with the vehicle which has low handling, acceleration, and top speed, and unlock more expensive models where the statistics all go up in near-unison. Needless to say, once you’ve bought the most expensive truck, there is no reason not to use it for every race.
To the game’s credit, it tries very hard to mix things up by offering a dozen different racing modes, but a few flaws keep these choices from being truly interesting. For one thing, everything is locked behind the game’s career mode, making it essentially mandatory if you ever want to race more than one track. The career mode isn’t a bad addition, presenting a broad enough variety of game modes and tracks to keep the player interested, but forcing the player to go through it in order to experience the full extent of the game is tedious. Off Road is such a simple and accessible game, it would have been better off playing to that strength instead of trying to put forth an appearance of depth (since it really isn’t there).
The aforementioned dozen race modes are a nice touch, but they can ultimately be distilled down to three basic archetypes: Beat the race quickly (race, elimination, time attack, checkpoint race, gauntlet, point to point), beat the race carefully (overtake, damage control, slalom), or beat the race while grabbing stuff off the track (gold rush, expedition, seconds out). They make for a good mix, with some being executed better than others (slalom is pretty terrible), but they start to blend together too soon — even after being forced to unlock them.
In the end, the thing that provides replay value for a good racing game is the multiplayer, and this is a notable shortcoming for Off Road. I can understand restricting multiplayer to 2-player split-screen on the PS2, but for the PC? That’s a fairly poor choice. Nobody wants to crowd awkwardly around a keyboard these days when there are so many better options for social play. The PSP version has 6-player wi-fi, so it’s a fairly glaring omission not to have provided online play for the PC version. This might have been a good addition ten years ago, but it just won’t cut it by today’s standards.
Honestly, that’s the major sentiment that will present itself more than any other when playing Off Road. It’s not a bad game, not at all. It’s a perfectly competent little racer, and if you’re on a tight budget, grabbing this out of the bargain bin will keep you busy for several hours. It’s just that it brings absolutely nothing new to the table. Most any game on the market could replace it, and provide a better presentation with innovative gameplay. On the other hand, if you’re of the opinion that racing games (and graphics) peaked back in the early 1990s, then you’re all set.
Full disclosure: At time of publication, Empire Interactive was a client of TriplePoint PR, a firm managed by Richard Kain — owner of our parent company Pantheon Labs. A TriplePoint representative sent us the above title.
July 24th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Nice callback to the SPOGS review.
July 24th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
What can I say? I enjoy the classics.
Classics that are a week old or so, but still.