Following on from yesterday’s double game blog on A.I.M., I bring you A.I.M. Racing. A racing game, set in the A.I.M. universe.
SUPPLIEESS!!!
As you’ll recall -- I hope -- I wasn’t looking forward to this game, due to my dislike of the previous A.I.M. games, but as it turns out, A.I.M. Racing is kind of good. Or well, it’s not bad, at all. I cannot really find any faults with this game whatsoever -- except its use of SecuRom.
With the previous games, there is no real setup for why you’re racing these mech things through courses designed within the A.I.M. universe, but honestly, that doesn't matter. You compete in a championship, progressing through rounds, and at the end of each round you unlock a few new ships, and a skill upgrade.
The controls though, oh the controls; no more using the mouse, just the keyboard, and it’s wonderful. It makes the game a whole lot easier, as it has some sort of auto-lock on the enemy ships, so you can just get in range and spam Z to fire your main guns.
You have different attributes for each ship: speed, acceleration, weapons etc, and these are what is different about each ship. I, as I generally do, chose the one with the best speed and acceleration and sped off at the start of every race and the rest of the ships were unable to catch me, and if they did, taking them out seemed pretty easy. Hitting shift gives you a temporary speed boost, which refills every 20 seconds or so, and when coupled with the speed boost pick-up allows you to quickly gain some time on your opponents, guaranteeing an easy victory.
The pick-ups were your general pick-up style pick-ups: rockets, mines, ammo, health, shield, and speed boost. The rockets locked on, and the mines lay there where you dropped them, as mines do; I ended up getting quite a few kills with the mines somehow, I guess the AI thought ‘OOOOH SHINY THING’ and went explode a lot.
It reminded me of a Star Wars podracing game I used to play at my uncle’s house when I was younger, (Google recognises podracing as a real word btw) and I think I would have played the hell out of this when I was younger. This being good has been a nice surprise, but it has left this blog somewhat boring. Oh well.
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