There are racing games that you can’t put down and then there are racing games that you want to put down right away. Split Second lands somewhere in between the two. If I weren’t writing a review for this game and a little bit of an achievement whore I would have stopped playing Split Second after the the first time I “accidentally” hit some little piece of geometry that is invisible when your going over hundred miles an hour down a straight.
Before I get down on Split Second let me say that it is probably the modern version of Burnout. Which only makes me want to see what the folks over at EA could do with a NEW BURNOUT. Come on guys, one more time with feeling. Split Second does allow you to do some serious damage to both your opponent cars and the course it self. You can even change the course so drastically that it can open up whole new routes that can change the way the course is driven. This is both the game’s greatest strength and ultimately one of it’s greatest weaknesses.
The tracks are great, they have a few different ways of going through them and certainly some of the explosions the first or second time you see them are pretty mind blowing. But as time wears on, and it will, you will get accustomed to these explosions and pretty much just make sure you remember how to get around the ensuing carnage that the explosions create. Certainly all of the cool physics of the game are highlighted here. The graphics are wonderful as you can see in the screenshots but most of the cars could probably have looked better. Especially because these cars aren’t licensed. Which brings me to another problem with Split Second, the cars look all most completely the same and you can’t change the color of the Elite Class cars. I can understand why developers do this when the cars are unique cars from a manufacturer but if your creating the cars yourself they should be a lot cooler looking and you should be able to change their colors; all of them.
The real problem with Split Second is that the game is all ways trying to make you play more of it by making sure all the Elite main races are locked behind credit totals that you must unlock in order to do. This is similar to the old system of making the player get a 3rd in every race system to move on. Except this system makes the player thing that they don’t have to do that; when with the exception of flaking out on the Airstrike and Air Revenge events you pretty much do. Too bad most of races and events are SO similar that by the time you reach the end of the 12th Episode, you just want to end.
I’m sure your wondering why I’m REALLY so down on this game. Two things: the rubber banding A.I. and the incredible lack of consistency in the properties of the vehicles. I could probably have dealt with the latter if not for the former. There is nothing worse in this game than the ridiculously stupid A.I. The whole game is about wrecking your opponents but what is the point of doing that if a quarter of a link later those same opponents can be on your back bumper once again. In one of the final races I triggered a 6 car wreck. But less than half a lap later all of the cars I’d wrecked were right on my back bumper all bunched up like I had just passed them, not wrecked them. However, when the player wrecks, you usually end up anywhere from 1 position to 5 positions back from where you were wrecked. Sometimes in the Elite Main races you just start back in 8th. Don’t get me wrong, wrecking people is fun; but only when there is some pay off. And i don’t mean just getting them out of your way. The other big issue I had was that all most half of the cars in the game had ridiculous drift but couldn’t do anything else. Which made them useless. You would move into a turn and just drift across the turn, losing spots, speed etc… Then there are the trucks that have incredible durability but if you hit a turn wrong you end up crashed instead of bouncing off the side panel like normal. So what’s the incredible durability for if you aren’t going to be given the benefit of bouncing off a bad turn.
Finally, Split Second just gets to be a drudge to play. The only fun I had was unlocking the insane 20+ achievements in the game for basically just playing through the career mode. Which incidentally is really your only choice at the beginning because all most none of the cars are unlocked to begin with. If you want to play online you NEED to finish the Career mode first. It will unlock tracks and cars. If you don’t, don’t even bother trying because all most everyone else will have either unlocked those cars or paid to have them unlocked through DLC. Which I think is awful; making people play offline to unlock stuff and then when they don’t want to play through the many hour career mode giving them the choice to unlock said cars and tracks by paying. Why not just charge $5 more for the game and unlock everything for online right off? Oh yeah, people would think that was the publisher or developer being cheap.
If Split Second had a no rubber band A.I. and better handling on the cars in the game. It would be great even with the limited number of tracks and cars. But as it stands, even with DLC tracks which considering the size of these tracks I don’t think there will be any. This game just isn’t worth owning. Maybe a rental if your bored and everything else is checked out. But considering the number of great racing games for the XBOX 360 and the few good ones for the PS3. You could probably skip Split Second without losing out on much. And if you really can’t find anything go out and rent Blur. I’ve played enough of it to know that it is all ready MUCH better than this game.
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