Split/Second

                When you play Spit/Second you will feel like God himself, reaching down and affecting the race in epic and memorable ways.   Causing helicopters to crash or triggering natural disasters to rain down on your opponents will make you feel like superman.   Split/Second allows you to trigger all of these events but also puts such a variety of events in the game that you will continuously be surprised by the variety.   This helps with the replayability of Split/Second and will keep you coming back for a while

                The ideal race in Split/Second doesn’t have to be the fastest race time, but it may be the time you send an avalanche onto your opponents in order to wipe out the rest of the field.   Or perhaps it is the time that you drift every corner to continuously rain down destruction onto you unfortunate competitors.  

                Split/Second leaves it up to you as to whether you want to trigger power plays right when you get them or save them up for the more impressive route changes.   Personally I used my power plays quickly and as soon as possible because I wanted the quick reward but every time I would destroy one or two opponents, I would ask myself if I had just missed an epic route change because my meter wasn’t full enough.   But on the other hand there were other times I had saved my meter to change the track and found it had already occurred.   I found myself drifting every corner and that would lose positions sometimes and that hurt my driving and it made the game less fun.

                I can’t tell you how to use your power meter, but don’t worry if you feel like you missed something on the track, don’t fret about it, odds are you will want to race there again while you play.   Black Rock does a pretty good job of letting you see all of the potential game changers throughout the course of the “story” mode by revisiting tracks, but this can take away from some of the impressiveness of the power plays.

                But don’t get me wrong, the game still has the ability to surprise due to the number of standard power plays available and the other drivers ability to trigger said events will keep you guessing as to how the race will go.   The physics of the game also work to make each trigger of a play unique and when the enemy take someone ahead of you, you have to wonder as you lose visibility in the effect if you are going to get wrecked in the aftermath.   It is this tension that makes me continue to race even after I have seen the epic set pieces.

                The optional modes of the game were also impressive and kept me pretty entertained.   Air survival keeps the tradition of hating helicopters alive as you dodge an evil chopper that tries to kill you with a myriad of weaponry and explosive barrels that are continually littered on the track.   One of my favorite modes was elimination which is in other racing games and simply removes whoever is in last place at the end of each lap.   This game is a lot of fun and keeps you coming back, but some of the repetition can slow it down.