Giant Bomb Review
51 CommentsSplit/Second Review
4- PS3
- X360
by Ryan Davis on
Split/Second's high-gloss mayhem is best-in-class, though it peaks early, and the chaos can overwhelm the actual racing.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here, as there's nothing terribly self-explanatory about the incredible contrivances that make Split/Second unique, and occasionally great. Speaking broadly, I've taken to describing it as Burnout in reverse--rather than throwing cars at the environments to see what happens, you get your warm-and-fuzzies in Split/Second by throwing the environment at the cars. This Burnout comparison holds up, I think, beyond the concept stage, as Split/Second has a similar zest for destruction, and it too rewards the player for drifting, drafting, and jumping. What you get in Split/Second for your driving derring-do, though, is energy towards a three-part power-play meter. Power plays, in the simplest terms, are explosive environmental triggers you can use to derail, or simply destroy, competing racers--and if you're not careful, yourself--and they are the absolute crux of Split/Second.
You can also tap into your power-play meter to open up shortcuts. Bigger power plays will drain all three sections of your meter, as will the dramatic mid-race course changes, which are really Split/Second's pièce de résistance. Skyscrapers will tip, cruise ships will run aground, and massive dams will crumble with a profound immediacy as you hurtle down the course doing a simulated buck-twenty. Couching these incredible disasters in a racing game is the purest genius of Split/Second, because there's ultimately no avoiding the chaos that's unfurling in front of you--the best you can hope is to dodge the worst parts of it. There's actually a replay option that will occasionally pop up after you've done something truly atrocious, but watching these disasters from a static perspective is comparatively kind of boring.
Split/Second brokers heavily in lookalike landmarks for its mocked-up city, and it seems pretty deliberate that you might be reminded of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Space Needle, or the Hoover Dam while playing the game. There's certainly an extra charge to be had from seeing recognizable structures come tumbling down, but the game is also clear about making the whole thing "safe," at least from a weird, twice-removed psychological standpoint. You see, this isn't a real city. I mean, yeah, it's a video game, so you already inherently know it's not a "real" city. But even within the reality of the game, it's actually just a giant, elaborate soundstage built specifically for an impossibly big-budget reality TV competition called Split/Second, which is kicking off its next season.
So some of the events are duds, but the two things that really temper my appreciation for Split/Second are repetition, cheatin'-ass AI opponents, and repetition. Repetition is kind of an inherent issue for racing games in general, since your performance often hinges on knowing, or at least being able to anticipate, what's coming next. But Split/Second is all about the shock of first impressions, and repetition is death for surprises. The first time you see a big location-specific power play go off, you're too gobsmacked by what you're seeing to really react. The second time, you have some idea of what's coming and can prepare yourself accordingly. By the third time you're not even looking at what's blowing up, since, if you're doing the same race three times in a row, you're probably preoccupied with struggling against the aforementioned cheatin'-ass AI opponents.
This confluence led me to a weird, contrived gameplay style where I would try and outsmart the simple rubberband AI by deliberately hanging out in the middle of the pack for most of the race, only to really break out in the back half of the final lap. The constant chaos already makes it seem like you're barely in control of your fate; the obviously rigged competition makes your impact on the outcome at least feel diminished. Hell, maybe they should've gone for an evil executive subplot after all. The eight-player online multiplayer, as you might imagine, is unfettered by such AI issues, though it's still somewhat affected by the increased familiarity brought on by repetition.
One of the toughest parts of reviewing a video game is assessing how much value to place on, well, value. If you were going by the pure math of hours-to-dollars, Split/Second might not seem great, and in the long-term, there's not a huge amount of replayability here. Yet I can't help but place a high value on my first few hours with Split/Second, which were action-packed with more jaw-dropping thrills than any other recent game I care to recall. While I have a number of concerns about the overall execution of Split/Second, the lows are well worth tolerating for highs that are so good, so crazy, and so face-numbingly intense.
