Smash Cars

Platform - PS3

Racing these speedy little cars can be fun, but Smash Cars is disappointingly light on content. Though remote control racecars can be fast, flashy, and fun, they are still stripped-down imitations of their larger counterparts. The same can be said about Smash Cars. In this downloadable game, you race a variety of RC cars through vibrant environments and perform acrobatic stunts to help you speed your way to victory. The core action is fun and conveys a good sense of speed, but it has its limits. The detailed tracks are set on one lone island, and there are only 12 single-player events. Completing these events takes only a few hours, though striving to earn all the gold medals takes significantly longer. Unfortunately, some awkward physics make it unpleasantly difficult to race at the high speeds required to medal in the later races. This deflates much of the replay value, and with no local multiplayer and a sparsely populated online multiplayer soon after launch, Smash Cars doesn't make a good case for its $14.99 price point. There's some speedy fun to be had here, but there should be more.

Despite its shortcomings, Smash Cars does deliver on presentation. The crisp, shiny car models look great as they zip along well-textured tracks. The courses are all laid out on one sunny Mediterranean island, and while there is some diversity, it would have been great to see how the attention to visual detail could have brought other environments to life. Many of the 12 races are only subtly different, and while racing counterclockwise on the course you just raced clockwise on provides a different challenge, it creates the feeling that there isn't much variety here.

Regardless of which way you're racing, every course is littered with things you can crash into, such as railings, poles, crates, people, trucks, cones, and other obstacles. Running into some items will stop you in your tracks, while smashing through others will help replenish your boost meter. Soda bottles give you a small boost, but don't slow you down; empty crates offer bigger boost bonuses, but they drain your momentum slightly. Deciding which items to barrel through adds an interesting dimension to the action, and zipping around these busy tracks is visually entertaining and technically challenging. Still, any collision can adversely affect your trajectory, and the higher your speed, the more serious the threat of derailment. It's perfectly reasonable to be penalized for crashing into or through something, but sometimes the collision physics are a little wonky and send you careening off in an unexpected direction. This is frustrating, but at least you know the cause of your misfortune. However, you will occasionally find yourself speeding around a turn or boosting down a straightaway when all of a sudden you are locked into a drift or sent flying through the air at a skewed angle with no idea how you ended up that way. These abrupt misfortunes are very aggravating and will make you feel that the car physics are screwed in too tight.

You'll also encounter some physics issues when you attempt crazy jumps, but these are generally more forgiving. By jumping off the end of a ramp, you can get a lot of air with which to flip, spin, and otherwise contort your car. You can rotate your car by twisting your controller or by holding a button and using the left analog stick. The latter option is preferable because the motion controls make it very difficult to land with any kind of precision. You don't have to land perfectly--not by a long shot--but you do have to generally keep your underside down. The analog stick makes this general precision much easier, and you'll be whipping out quadruple flips in no time. The more spins you manage, the more boost power you'll earn, and boosting is essential if you want to earn gold. Smash Cars is good, fast fun when you're racing in a car you're comfortable with, jostling opponents, zipping through shortcuts, pulling big stunts, pushing your boost to the limit, and snatching quick flips here and there to keep your boost meter stocked. Many of the races allow you to enjoy this fun, though the aforementioned physics oddities can quickly dampen your enjoyment.

Fortunately, in most races, you can recover from setbacks with skilled driving, so you probably won't feel like a victim to oversensitive physics until you are striving for gold in the tougher competitions. For the majority of the races, you'll be bumping tires with opponents that are driving one of three types of cars. There's the slow-yet-maneuverable Monster type; the midrange Buggy type; and the high-speed, hard-to-handle Sport type. You start with only the Monster type, and as you earn medals, you'll unlock the other two types, new bodies for each type, and new paint-customization options. Though there are 12 different cars in all, you'll likely stick to a speedy Buggy for most of the game. Monster trucks are too slow, and Sport cars go so ridiculously fast that only the most skilled players will be able to keep them on track. The Buggy has a good blend of weight and speed that makes it ideally suited for picking out the best line and speeding through the course. Yet, though you can paint your car all the colors of the rainbow, the limited variety of cars is a bit disappointing.

If limited car and track variety creates the sense that Smash Cars isn't very robust, the multiplayer offerings really drive it home. There is no local multiplayer, so if you're hoping to have friends over for some fun racing action, you are out of luck. You can race online with up to five other players and drive any of the courses from the single-player game. Connections are generally lag-free, but available games are few and far between. If you create your own, a few people will usually trickle in, but the game was realeased very recently and the online population is extremely low. Once you finish the race, each player is bumped back to the online multiplayer menu screen, so you have to create a new game and have competitors rejoin after every single race. Smash Cars could have greatly benefitted from robust multiplayer support, but the actual offerings are disappointingly bare.

There is fun to be had in Smash Cars. Racing around the rich environments and pulling a few flips while speeding your way to victory is satisfying and enjoyable. Unfortunately, Smash Cars doesn't give you enough opportunity to just enjoy it. Limited tracks, finicky physics, and poor car variety limit the appeal of single-player races. Racing against other people can be entertaining, but you'll have to depend on the desolate online community to show up and challenge you. With more fuel in the tank, Smash Cars could have been a success, but unfortunately, it just runs out of gas too soon.

The Good

Detailed, interesting tracks

Sharp, vibrant environments

Fast, fun racing action.

The Bad

No local multiplayer

Slightly wonky physics

Only 12 single-player races

Very small pool of online competitors

Weak car variety.

By Chris Watters

Brought You By Gamespot

Spectrobes: Origins

Platform - Wii

Spectrobes: Origins is an action role-playing game that pits you and your team of powerful spectrobes against a dark force that devours whole galaxies. It marks the first time that the series has made the leap from handheld to console and features a healthy variety of spectrobes and a promising battle system, but its core mechanics never mature enough to create a truly gripping adventure. It's also quite repetitive and beset by numerous annoying faults that make this a charming but unrefined button masher. The plot is unexciting and predictable with flat characters and obvious twists, but it provides a sufficient backdrop that is nicely accentuated by spectrobes: creatures that fight alongside human masters. You're cast as Rallen and Jeena who are spectrobe masters. They are also members of the Nanairo Planetary Patrol, which is an organization dedicated to the eradication of vicious krawl monsters roaming the universe. After being sucked through a portal to the planet Wyterra, you must save the world from the krawl.

Similar to other monster-battling games, you'll lead a team of spectrobe creatures that span various elemental properties and types, such as fire and flying, to best foes and access new areas. Spectrobes awakened from fossils begin in child form and are easily managed via a virtual incubator room, where you feed them items you've collected to increase their health or experience. You can also evolve them to combat-ready adult form or train them via attack dummies, but otherwise, your interaction is fairly limited. Once on the field, child spectrobes are handy for unlocking doors and fetching items, and they're especially useful for solving puzzles as you explore open environments and robust temple ruins. These brainteasers are easy for the most party, but they're specifically tailored to each temple, so they at least keep the exploration vaguely interesting.

The real-time battle system is fast-paced and, at times, it's also fun. Combat actively incorporates the motion technology of the controllers in a refreshing twist where a simple swing of the remote commands your adult spectrobe to attack, while a tilt of the nunchuk dodges with your character. Spectrobes also employ devastating special attacks you initiate by holding the remote and nunchuk in a set pose, which is mildly entertaining. You can also perform basic combos by attacking the same monster with both a spectrobe and your character. Elemental attributes provide some depth by encouraging you to capitalize on a krawl's weakness, such as a plant-type krawl's susceptibility to fire. Weapon variety continues this theme and boasts several weapon types for your character--such as swords and axes that have elemental attributes--but these features are undermined by easy foes and dull button mashing. You'll also encounter some targeting difficulty when backed into corners or crowded because the camera swings and bounces the reticle, which reduces most boss battles to annoying tests of luck rather than skill. Spectrobe AI also irritates because the creatures will occasionally get caught on environmental objects or stand there as you're being thrashed, forcing you to reissue attack commands.

The tedious gameplay is worsened by the fact that you have to engage in excessive experience grinding. This additional leveling is needed to keep your full adult spectrobe team competitive with the krawl, who make significant level leaps, and because of the general difficulty in designing a well-balanced team that spans elemental types. Exacerbating this problem is a complete lack of spectrobe skill customization, because there's no way to tailor creatures to suit your play style or strategy. There's also little reward for leveling your spectrobes past a certain point, which makes grinding for experience even more of a chore later on. A few minigames offer some fun, even though they're limited in scope. For example, one in which you excavate fossils determines the level of your spectrobes based on how carefully and quickly you free them from ancient rock. You can also resurrect spectrobes in a simplistic minigame by swinging the remote to mimic a brief musical tune. Spectrobes: Origins also boasts a two-player cooperative feature, which lets you instantly switch a friend into or out of the action. Your partner is limited to controlling your spectrobes instead of his or her own team, which works, but is a little disappointing. You'll also encounter additional camera oddities during co-op, because the camera closely follows your character but frequently obscures or abandons your partner.

The game's brightly colored and open areas are visually appealing and feature sun-scorching deserts and crystal-clear flowing streams. However, jagged edges appear on the otherwise smoothly detailed environmental objects and character models. There's a healthy variety of spectrobes, and child spectrobes are adorably designed and modeled after animals, though some--including flying onions and pink bunny slippers--are a bit zanier. Adult spectrobe design is sufficiently intimidating, and they are all accompanied by flamboyant attack effects, though those occasionally cause slowdown. The musical backdrop is quite soothing and subtle and appropriately matches exploration locales and soft ambient noises, such as rushing water, but it is slightly marred by a cheesy rock battle theme and grating attack cries.

You can complete the main story in around 25 hours, and this includes a fair amount of time spent leveling various spectrobes in your quest to design the ultimate team. The game does make use of some minor backtracking and sports very few side quests, though there are several unlockable bonus missions and a new side story rewarded upon completion. Spectrobes: Origins has a decent, if extremely primitive, foundation with fast-paced combat, two-player co-op, and a cute excavating minigame, but it fails to evolve into a more compelling and sophisticated monster battler.

The Good

Fast-paced combat with neat motion controls

Open, aesthetically pleasing environments

Good variety of creatures to control.

The Bad

Primitive gameplay

Combat gets repetitive

Lacks compelling creature customization.

By Shiva Stella

Brought You By Gamespot

SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny

Platform - PSP

When you start playing SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny's single-player Gauntlet mode, a warning pops up on the screen to let you know that its bizarre story is "based on obscure fables and does not accurately represent SoulCalibur history." Fortunately, just about everything else in Broken Destiny feels very much like it belongs in the long-running fighting series. The weapon-based combat is as accessible and as deep as ever, the arenas are ripped right out of SoulCalibur IV, and the two new fighters introduced in this game are definitely a better fit than the Star Wars characters that graced the aforementioned Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game. There's not enough compelling single-player content here to make Broken Destiny a must-have if you're planning on going solo, but add a friend with a second copy of the game to the equation, and good times are guaranteed.

All 28 of the fighters on Broken Destiny's roster are available from the outset. You can also create your own fighters from scratch using limited customization tools to determine their physical appearance and then dress them up in gear chosen from a massive wardrobe, much of which has to be unlocked. There are no performance bonuses associated with clothing and weapons this time around, which is unfortunate if you really enjoyed that aspect of SoulCalibur IV, but great if you want to wear all of the matching pieces of the Santa costume without feeling like your fashion choices are compromising your effectiveness. Regardless of which fighter you choose to play as and what he or she is wearing, Broken Destiny, like previous SoulCalibur offerings, is easy to pick up and grasp the basics of. You can move in eight directions using the D pad or the analog nub, and face buttons are used to guard and to perform basic horizontal attacks, vertical attacks, and kicks. That's really all you need to know to get started, though you'll find that there are plenty of more advanced techniques to master if you check out the character-specific move lists in the useful Training mode.

Oddly, Broken Destiny doesn't feature an Arcade mode in which to pit your chosen combatant against a number of opponents en route to a matchup with a boss. In its place is Trials mode, which incorporates three distinct score-based challenges in Attack, Defense, and Endless flavors. In the Trial of Attack you're pitted against five opponents and earn score bonuses for playing aggressively and for landing combos. The Trial of Defense is a little longer and culminates in a boss battle against Algol from SoulCalibur IV, so in that respect it's a lot like that game's Arcade mode. The main difference here is that you score points and earn bonuses for guarding against your opponent's attacks and retaliating quickly. Endless Trial is a survival mode of sorts, except that your fighter regains all of his health between rounds. Seeing how many of the increasingly tough opponents you can make it past without ever losing is a lot of fun, but your score isn't based on that. Rather, every time you land a blow you earn points, and there's a score multiplier that goes up when you hit your opponent but falls back down when you get hit. The scoring system in the trials means there's some fun to be had replaying them to beat your best performances, but it's unfortunate that there's no way for you to compare your high scores with those of other players online.

Outside of quick one-on-one matches against the AI that you choose from a pseudo online lobby complete with win/loss records for different players, Broken Destiny's only other single-player content is the story-driven Gauntlet mode. Spanning more than 30 chapters each composed of multiple challenges, this mode is really just a lengthy tutorial that trains you to defend against every character in the game. Learning to effectively evade and guard against your opponent's attacks is important, and if you take the time to play through all of the 80-plus Gauntlet challenges, you'll almost certainly emerge a better player than you were when you went into it. You're not necessarily going to have much fun along the way though.

Save for a boss fight at the very end, Gauntlet mode is comprised almost entirely of challenges that last just a few seconds, and in that time you have to complete a number of very specific objectives to progress. For the most part, that means starting with very little health, avoiding an enemy's attacks, and then landing an attack of your own. You're set up to fail most of these the first time, because unless you're a seasoned SoulCalibur veteran, you're not going to know if the attacks coming at you in rapid succession are going to be high or low, vertical or horizontal, or even unblockable. Fail once, and you're given feedback from other characters that, more often than not, includes a breakdown of exactly what you need to do. That's good, because hearing the announcer say "mission failed" over and over again in a short space of time when you get stuck on a challenge can be infuriating.

As you progress through Gauntlet mode, you're introduced to throw escapes, stun recoveries, guard impacts, aerial controls, interrupts, and a number of other features that leave you in no doubt as to how deep the fighting system is. You're also exposed to facets of the fighters' personalities that you've never seen before and that, frankly, you probably won't want to see again. Yun-seong believes he's receiving messages from aliens, Zasalamel is an interdimensional peeping tom, Nightmare cries a lot, and moonwalking newcomer Dampierre has a penchant for young girls that's second only to his feelings about facial hair. In short, by the time you reach the end of the Gauntlet mode you're left in no doubt as to why the story isn't considered SoulCalibur canon. The only character who makes it through the mode with his reputation intact is Kratos, the antihero of Sony's God of War series.

In fact, Kratos makes it through all of Broken Destiny's modes without losing face. Not only does he have a formidable arsenal of moves that make him feel quite different from anyone else on the roster, but in Creation mode, the only option you have for customizing him is to equip him with very slightly different chain-blade weapons. Leather loafers, short slops, goddess gauntlets, and elf ears are available elsewhere on the roster, but the only options available to Kratos are the same outfit he wears in the God of War games and the suit of armor he can be seen wearing at the start of God of War II. Regardless, he's a good addition to the roster, and with unusual abilities that include launching himself into the air using Icarus wings and swinging from the chains attached to his blades, he poses a challenge whether you're going up against him or attempting to master his moves yourself. The same can be said of Dampierre, who employs concealed weapons and an unorthodox fighting style that frequently causes him to lose his balance.

The best way to put your skills with either of the SoulCalibur newcomers to the test, of course, is to use them not against the admittedly impressive AI but against another player in Versus mode. Unfortunately, there's no online play, but the option to play against friends locally in an ad hoc party is well implemented at least. Connecting is quick and easy, the gameplay is lag-free, and your win/loss records with different opponents are remembered across multiple sessions. Also deserving of a mention is an option to install a portion of the game data to your memory stick, which almost completely cuts out any load times between matchups, not just in Versus mode, but across the entire game.

SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny's presentation is impressive in almost every regard. Fighters are detailed and animate smoothly, the varied arenas they do battle in are nicely lit, and the accompanying sound effects make attacks feel even more powerful than they look. The orchestral soundtrack is a great fit and, in conjunction with the over-the-top fight announcer and some ostentatious one-liners from the characters themselves, it makes every battle feel like an epic encounter.

Because the bulk of its single-player content is best suited to players who already have some SoulCalibur experience, Broken Destiny isn't quite as easy to recommend to newcomers as other games in the series. However, if you're already comfortable with SoulCalibur or with similar 3D fighting systems and can live with the lack of online play, there's really no reason you shouldn't pick this one up posthaste.

The Good

Accessible but deep combat system forces you to defend as well as attack

28 very different characters to play with from the outset

Ad hoc multiplayer works well

Superb presentation throughout.

The Bad

Not enough good single-player content

Gauntlet mode story is laughable

No online play.

By Justin Calvert

Brought You By Gamespot