Rollcage
On the paper, there is no reason why I shouldn't love this game. It's a fast, action packed futuristic racing game. Not only fast, the cars can also drive upside down and on both the walls and the cieling. A variety of pickups allow you to casue all kinds of trouble to your opponents, including blasting buildings by the track and letting them fall on the cars. Graphics look really good, and the feeling of speed is almost as good as in Racer. Rollcage even features music by Fatboy Slim among others to accompany the sound effects, which aren't too bad either.
Still, I can't fall madly in love with this game, and the main reason is hidden somewhere among the physics of the game. Simply, once you start spinning or sliding you'll probably have to stop before you can get things right again. This problem wouldn't be as large if the tracks were longer, but they're not. They're actually pretty short, and you normally only race three or four laps. That makes about that number of crashes more than enough to place you at a hopeless last position. Another headache is that it's very easy to get in dizzying spins if you turn a bit too much when driving up toward the cieling of round tunnels. These spins tend to end with you facing the wrong direction, and you'll be lucky to be anywhere but last once you get going again. At least the computer drives do mistakes too, but they tend to end up ahead anyway ...
Controls are few, at least those you'll need all the time, and responsive. If you try to use a joystick they're actually so responsive you'll have to go back to the keyboard to get any semblance of control of your vehicle ...
As said above, the tracks are short and intensive. There are quite many of them too, but they don't really feel very inventive or different. I feel the ability to drive on walls and cielings could have been used a lot more in track design. The tracks can be quite annoying too, as the reaction time you always get in Racer seems to be absent most of the time here. The computer drivers are good at sabotaging your driving too, by either pushing you off the track, or hit you and make you spin just when you were about to get going again after the last spin. It takes very little car to car contact to make you lose control, and I don't like that at all ...
Yet, even after all this, I still play it every now and then. It's probably that it does look very pretty and plays fast in combination with the fact that I don't have any other games I like to play right now ... Not bad, but Racer is a lot better.
