An explosive racing experience.
I guess I'm making this review a little late, though I guess if you're like me, you love to (nowadays) buy some really awesome PS3 games at a GameStop for a really cheap price. Specially arcade racers like this.
A Little Overview
Split/Second is an arcade racing game made by Disney Interactive Studios and Blackrock Studios in which its story is a one season fake TV show (obviously titled Split Second), and this season is divided into episodes. Each episode contains different challenges that you need to beat, giving you a gold medal for every challenge you place in 1st. The cars (and pick up trucks) in this game aren't real, but still they provide a really good variety of 'em with different stats including Speed, Drift, Strength, and Acceleration. The innovative essence of this game is that you can alter the race track by using something called Power Play. This involves on you triggering an explosion that causes buildings to fall down, cars to be flipped over, shortcuts, or even track route changes. It doesn't seem kinda innovative now in 2015, but in it's time it was the raddest motherfucking thing I've seen in a racing game.
Review
First of all, one of the things that I really loved about this game is that the car select screen takes about less than 3 seconds to render a car, and you can change it's color in real time as it shows you a preview of the car. It also runs in a stable frame/rate, even for playing split screen. So, basically, the game totally works for about 95% of the time.
The driving speed seems alright. I wouldn't say that it's as awesome as the feel when you play Burnout Paradise, but, taking in account that the cars don't have any sort of boost, it feels pretty good. It's fast, and it even has a good, rumbly feel once you start reaching full speed. The drifting feels good, too, but we also have to take in account that some cars have different stats, and one of their attributes involves drift. Depending on how much drift each car has, it gives really good variety and personality to the different vehicles.
Speaking about variety, the different challenges are fucking insane. You've got the obvious challenges like Race, which is easy: Place 1st to win, Detonator, which is basically Time Trial, and Elimination, which has been used in previous Need For Speed games, Motorstorm, and more. You've also got some other cool interesting ones like Air Strike, in which you're against a helicopter who's fucking blazing at you with some missiles, and your way to get back to him is to get enough power bars (by dodging those missiles) to reflect the missiles back at it. It's pretty sweet.
I loved the experience. All of the triggered explosions in the game look really impressing. You will have really huge towers fall down right in the middle of the track, a fucking plane crashing in front of you, even a train wreck destroying the entire racing track. All of these happen in real time, no cutscene or anything. You can trigger a replay with L1 once you destroy a rival, but I really didn't pay so much attention to this feature.
I also loved the music made for this game. Some drum & bass is played while you race normally, but once you trigger Power Play, sometimes the music goes into a cinematic fade, giving it a lot of presence to the explosion, giving the moment a little more adrenaline.
In Conclusion
I didn't want to put a 5 star rating, but a 4 star one, just because this game didn't end up being a huge success, but hell, I fucking enjoying every single moment of the game. I loved how original it was with those challenges and the Power Play feature, and loved how challenging and difficult the racing became with each episode. If you love arcade racers, this is definitely a game you should try. I must admit that the game cover isn't convincing at all, and when you see that Disney made it, it feels weird. How could Disney be part of a good driving game? That seems impossible. Well, I'll tell you that Blackrock really gets the job done with racing games. They also made PURE, and it appeared to have a good review in GiantBomb as well. Trust me. Play this shit NOW.
