Witch cards will drop: Blazerush

Blazerush is an old standard of game that has, on the most part, gone out of style. I played RC Pro AM back when I was a wee tyke and I'm sure everyone has heard of Rock n Roll racing, which was in the news recently when some Russian studio tried to make a clone and launch it on steam. That got deleted off Steam pretty quickly.

Anyway, basically you drive cars with an overhead isometric perspective, but rendered in proper 3d as opposed to the classic sprites that make up the long ago champions of the genre. In this case, you choose a driver and with it a car, and then drive around vaguely sci-fi tracks with a variety of scenarios. The basic game mode of driving to win the race makes up about a third of scenarios, with 'king of the hill' style races and this weird game mode where you're trying to stay in the lead because there's a giant rolling machine chasing the race and also not fall off, and you score points as people crash. The latter makes for some really enjoyable gameplay; the former usually starts with an AI breaking into the lead and then you just restart because the other AIs will jump on you if you try to catch up.

The gameplay is less built around consistently holding down the lead and more consistently recovering your position as you, and other cars, tumble off the track or get exploded by power-ups. In this sense the game is relatively fun for a couple hours, but it didn't hold my attention long.

In terms of visuals and audio, it's a nice looking little title with a couple decent sounding tracks. Nothing impressive, but easy on the eyes with some cool car designs. In theory there's hovercars and rocket cars, but they don't perform all that differently and don't expect F-zero style speed out of the game. In fact, since the camera aims to fit all the cars on the screen at the same time, you'll never get much of a lead going in this game. If a car falls back far enough, it actually gets leap frogged forward. So the sense of speed is lost a little, and instead the game is as I said, mostly about constantly recovering and tumbling off the track. Even the power ups feel kinda pointless in this. You get a mix of boosts and weapons, but most of the weapons will only knock someone back a little bit. There's just not that far back to actually go, probably because the game is designed as a couch game. Which is good if you're playing it as such, but I never did and I don't think I'd take time out of a social gathering to play an updated RC pro am, you know?

Which is fine, but don't expect it to feel like a skill-based racing game. There's not really much to talk about, when it comes to Blazerush. It has lots of medals and badges and scoring, but none of them really seemed to do much of anything besides unlocking tracks. As long as I continued to do ok in events, I never even noticed tracks needing more medals to unlock, pardoning 1 track once. Because of the game's chaotic nature, I barely even noticed the different tracks anyway. The power ups and game mode are way more crucial than the design of the track.

Anyway, Blazerush isn't a great game by an metric, but it's a solid enough title to play for an afternoon as I did before getting bored with it. Like I said, you don't find much variety in the tracks, but on top of that they don't change all that much or really push the limit. You can't fall back that far or get that huge a lead anyway, so it doesn't make much difference in the end. The night levels looked cool, but they actually just made it harder to pick up power ups, which is already a luck based hassle to begin with. If you happen to see it in a bundle or have it from a bundle, it's fine for said afternoon. But nothing I'd seek out at full price.