When you look back at the history of Bizarre Creations you would not be wrong to say it has been a series of musical chairs. They started with one of the original F1 games for the PSX and moved on to head up the Dreamcast favourite Metropolis Street Racer. Now, after 4 of the Batman copyright infringing Gotham series of games, we see the motor home reach Activision, and with it a new take (some would say even a grown up one) on an old and much loved formula.
If someone asked Mario, Luigi and all the others what they wanted to do when they grew up, other than save Princess Peach for the 90th time, then this could well be what would come of it. After heading to the car dealership, he would trade in his dinky kart for a nice and flashy new BMW, or perhaps a big Range Rover. The main thing about Blur which is noticeable rather quickly is the use of authentic cars, which would never usually be the case, as Burnout and the more recent Split/Second have proved. Whether or not this is a carry on from their past endeavours is anyone’s guess, but it does show a little hint that they want to keep some of their heritage intact.
If you haven’t already guessed from the opening few sentences, this is pretty much Mario Kart for the modern market, with mushrooms and shells making way for electric and pulse style weapons spewing from either end of a motor vehicle. The cars do have damage, albeit limited, but to keep everyone happy there are repair pick-ups scattered throughout the courses, which are also based on real life places, from San Francisco to Brighton, although I don’t think ALL of them are authentic (or if they are, I’d love to know where these places actually are).
There are a total of eight different things that you can grab to increase your arsenal or protect yourself from the oncoming attacks. Nitro, shunt, bolt, mine, shield, repair, barge and shock are, for most of them anyway, self explanatory. The ones that require a little bit more description are shunt, which chucks a glowing red sphere from your motor towards whoever is in front of you, with barge being the racing equivalent of a pinball machine bumper, leaving shock to produce 3 columns of electricity at the front of the pack to slow them down, allowing you time to catch up.
The single player mode does feel familiar to those of the PGR fraternity. You have your mixture of races and other weird and fun challenges, but unlike the games before Blur, this has a boss at the end of each section with a car you can attain if you soundly thrash him or her. The Kudos points are no more, but instead we have fan targets, which have you doing all sorts of things to ensure enough of the crowd like you to receive another light. These lights are your tally to increase throughout Blur, with more being awarded depending on where you finish, as well as the already mentioned fans and a trail you need to drive through when activated on track by running over the icon. They may not have a K next to them anymore, but they can be just as frustrating, especially when you get to later levels where the audience start demanding that you do stuff to please them. Much like Gladiatorial times, but without the blood.
It does look all flash and modern. The game itself is understandably solid enough in its looks, but you’d expect that from a company that have spent their entire coding life on racing games. To me it can sometimes be a bit too contemporary, with the only thing breaking the dullness of the tracks being the neon sign styled pick-ups. The lack of major colour is disappointing as you move from brownish gravel track to dark metropolis. It’s not to say it’s completely bereft of soul or character, but when you consider where this came from, you begin to think that more could have been done here.
The opening music is an awe inspiring mix of The Ecstasy of Gold from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Once we get into the game proper however, we start to get a lack of anything that stands out. Again, when you look back at the PGR series, you think about the multiple genres of music available to you at the flick of a D-pad. This time any music is heard and forgotten just as quickly, but then when you have so many bells, whistles and other strange noises echoing all around you as another shunt attack comes hurtling towards you, you kind of understand why. It’s not a major problem, but the option would have been nice.
The gameplay is where we see the biggest change, with the style and flair required before replaced by luck and weapons. There are times when some skill is needed to get around corners and to keep off of terrain that can slow you down, but it is leaning more towards arcade than its more proper roots. It plays well enough and the multiplayer can be rather enjoyable, but I think the timing of this release has also shown the only real downside to this game, the fact that the player can’t really see what it wants to be. Split/Second Velocity was released the week before and it is a pure (no pun intended) arcade racer, which pulls no punches about where it comes from. Blur always feels like PGR with attack powers, and slightly suffers from it because you wait for those big kudos corners and nice tight control, but it never comes. Whenever you play a game from this area in the racing genre, you need a sense of urgency and desire to get stuck in right from the off. Think of Daytona USA or any other major Sega racer without a timer and you would start to see the point.
Blur isn’t really a bad game. It has a fine pedigree and shows it very well, with so much solidity in all of its parts, but it is when all of those parts are brought together that you just feel something isn’t there. That vital spark which could elevate it to Mario Kart status seems to be lost in a sea of neon and burning rubber, but there is still plenty of reason to buy this as a game to chuck in from time to time with a few mates, especially if there are many of them online. Twenty player races are not to be sniffed at and to have an extremely solid engine underneath it is never a bad thing, but the now obligatory XP levelling up system can feel like a step too far at times.
If I had to choose between this and Split/Second I would choose the latter, just because it is a more traditional no holds barred racer, but Bizarre have a very credible foundation to build another franchise on, so the inevitable second one has the backing to be a monster on the starting grid.
VideogameUK verdict: 8/10
