Road Rage

Once upon a time, there was a game called Road Rash and the marketplace cover art for Road Rage looked just like it so I thought I would give it a go. The problem with this is while Road Rash was a good game in its time and would have offered nostalgia, Road Rage is a steaming pile of shit with no redeemable qualities whatsoever. And also bears no similarities to Road Rash.

Road Rage has some vague story which is delivered via phone calls but I’ll be honest, as soon as I realised that the game was crap, I didn’t bother listening or reading the text for this and just bombed it from mission to mission as fast as possible.

The gameplay is atrocious. It’s billed as an open world motorcycle game which sounds fine in principle but it’s not when the motorcycle physics are this bad. You will fall off (which is translated in game-world as ‘blow up’) every time; you hit a car at no matter what speed; you hit an AI opponent; an AI opponent hits you (so the AI is coded differently to the player); you look like you are going to hit a car; sometimes when you go near a lamppost and sometimes just for no reason at all.

The actual game missions are four or five different variants, either a street race, checkpoint time trail, assassination where you have to take out other AI, races where you have to take out multiple AI, or escaping the police. The hardest of these is taking out the multiple AI in a race. One mission has you tasked with taking out 10 of them and this is another area where the game is utter garbage.

You have a weapon which you can swing to your left or right. You press the X button to ‘initiate combat’ with an AI and the computer will take control of you and move you roughly alongside the AI. I say roughly because 9 times out 10, what it will do is position you in the perfect position to be taken out by the AI before you can do anything.

In terms of the missions, there is this one which is a difficulty spike and another assassination mission where the targets are at either end of the map and you have a stupidly small time limit in which to get them all.

Graphically, it looks piss poor for current generation and the amount of crashes I experienced felt likely down to the poor design of the game more than anything. Musically, it’s actually okay and the soundtrack I swear was done by the same guys that did the Crash Time series but that’s the only minor redeeming quality of the game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 33 Achievements

There’s not really a lot to the achievement list and a lot of this will come quite quickly as you start playing. Fifteen achievements will be obtained via playing through the main storyline with only those two difficult missions standing in the way of this happening with relative ease. You will also be buying stuff along the way such as weapons, new bikes, bike upgrades and bike parts. There are also achievements associated with spending money.

If more money is needed at any point, the easiest way to get it is to replay any escape mission and when it starts, pause the game. The police can’t chase you but the countdown is still decreasing in the background meaning it takes 30 seconds to get the cash reward. This can be repeated as many times as needed. Another glitch but at least this one works in the player’s favour.

As you play the game, you unlock different parts of the map and in each part is a single collectible for you to find for a total of 7 achievements. After that’s done, if you haven’t hit any pedestrians with your weapons yet, you will have four achievements left.

This is where the achievement list decides to join the rest of the game in being shitty. In order to get the full completion, you will need to hit pedestrians 1,000 times with your weapon. The biggest problem with this is the game feels the need to go in slow-motion for every hit so that 1,000 hits starts become more dragged out. Not to mention, for the gameplay, it’s an obnoxious number to start with. If you didn’t hate the game already, you definitely will by the time this is finished.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Road Rage is a terrible game and another sort-of racing game off my list thank god. Despite all I’ve said, it’s still relatively quick if not repetitive and boring completion, but still to be avoided.