Playstation 2 - L.A. Rush

Format
Playstation 2
Publisher
Midway
Developer
Pitbull
Country of origin
UK
Genre
Racing

L.A. Rush Preview

By David Rasmussen
23rd Oct 05

I think I’m making this game nervous.
It must be that it knows about my “skill” in these kind of games ‘cause from the start of the first thing I played on this DEMO the game started to have “a funny little feeling”. How do I know? That’s the only thing the one BGM song for this game exclaimed (basically) over and over again. Yeah, well if you saw me drive in these games “a funny little feeling” would be the least of the things you’d be feeling!

Because somethings (once they catch “on fire”) must be cloned endlessly (Grand Theft Auto clones or Twisted Metal clones or Resident Evil 4 clones or 1001 beat-em-up clone games), we have ANOTHER street racing game to consider for the year 2005! Like Grand Theft Auto freeroaming gameplay clones and the combat stylings of God of War cloned in the recent Midway release of Mortal Kombat : Shaolin Monks, this year one of the best things to emulate in gaming is Street Racing!
That of course wouldn’t be so bad if they were all of the same caliber as the racer Gran Turismo 4 or the hard hitting kamikaze street racing craze that is Burnout, however it seems Street Racing games has more in common with the contents of a minefield than either of these games… they are both plentiful and only a few will not cause you metaphoric harm if you come into contact with it.

Thus L.A. Rush is reviewed. Yet another cannon fodder street racing game in the large ocean of street racing games. Sure it looks nice and drives well and all, but is that all you really want out of a street racer? If so then you’re satisfied with less, ‘cause there could (and most likely should) be more… eh?
Let’s start with the first thing a game like this usually has… a story! Story? Does L.A. Rush have a story mode? If there is a story to this game I didn’t notice it in the demo, that and I didn’t take the time to actually care since the big thing in the game is the racing itself. I’m sure there’s a storymode in this game, really, it’s just not present in this short DEMO. The demo did, however, offer up three modes of racing.

Racing - Of course. Several small race demos give you a chance to see how racing is done in L.A., and how it’s done is… chaotically. You race through the streets of L.A. following the directions given by a above screen directional arrow and the fact you can see your next “checkpoint” from some distance as it appears as a giant pillar of light visible in the distance. Otherwise the “track” is not laid out, nor is it clear where you are going past the pillar of lights and the arrow that points where you have to go (a few seconds before you have to turn no less). I guess this is suppose to infer a feeling of independence to run the race as you wish, taking any road you want to get to the next checkpoint light… though for me it mostly was me crashing into things since I was either watching the arrow or the light to notice heavy traffic suddenly pop up in front of me at the next turn.

Yeah, without a set “track” to run, and all this free racing you might get lost… of course it also means the game doesn’t have that arcade driving feel to it… but whoever said that was a bad thing? Heck, you might even like this way of street racing… if you don’t crash too many times into common traffic littering the road first that is. Because this is seemingly free racing with no “track” to run you’ll have to dodge traffic and use large trucks towing ramps to jump over traffic jams… so how do I pay attention to the “prize” while watching out for the little people again? I don’t know, I just don’t know.

Time - Your car is set on cruise control and you are set driving with a simple goal in mind : reach the end of a length of road in such and such a time without either hitting another car or driving off the road and you’ll succeed. Miss either of these and it’s failure… boring.

Freeroam - Basically you can drive around town and…. That’s it. Stuff like being able to drive up and through the Hollywood sign was nice, but there is too few things to do here and (in this demo at any rate) no chance to pick up races or challenges while driving about.

It’s here that you also see the game’s obsession with the Burnout series as well as a few glitches.
- If you crash into anything you are “treated” to a slow motion crash ala Burnout. And if you crash into another vehicle the vehicle explodes a few seconds after the crash ala what would happen in Burnout.
Pity Burnout has a tight hold on it’s Crashbreaker mode lest there’d be some point to this, but seeing how Burnout is still the only place to find Crashbreaker mode there’s no point to these crashes.
Stick to Burnout if you are interested in watching flashy crashes with purpose.

- After crashes occasionally you’ll see cars floating in the air, which also happens rarely when driving. I’ve seen a car or two floating in parking lots for no reason once and thought it was rather weird. Also the game doesn’t always clean up it’s messes after crashes since you’ll find some cars are still on their side or upside down when you start racing again. Glitch? I think so.

- People always face away from you (never towards you). No matter how hard you try you can’t see what the people look like in this game! Also they run so awkwardly, not to mention when they move to flee from you they run into buildings to escape… as in run THROUGH the building, walls or glass windows or doors that don’t open… which seems to be a glitch, at least to me in anycase though they do get to safety quite efficiently that way.

As for the gameplay? It’s nothing to race over to your buds and rave about. It’s yet another drop into the street racing bucket, stick to the tried and true titles since they’re fan favorites for a good reason.
Sure, sure, there seems to be a ton of licensed cars and all (including the newly released Hummer known as the H2) but the gameplay modes shown in this demo seem a little dull. I guess if the final version has more gameplay modes, a storymode (which I’m sure it’ll have) and some reason to play this other than it’s ANOTHER street racing game then I might say something nicer about it. However, as the game stands at this moment with this DEMO? You might as well throw your money down on games you’ll enjoy (Gran Turismo 4 or Burnout 3 : Takedown slash Burnout : Revenge) over a game that doesn’t seem to be as good as those games. Still maybe the official release will change my mind… maybe. We’ll see.
Don’t count on it though. I’m not holding my breath for the redemption of L.A. Rush even if you can do things like break apart the HOLLYWOOD sign by driving your car through it.

-- David Rasmussen 23rd Oct 05

Playstation 2 L.A. Rush Images