Well, at first I was planning to do a full review of Blur. It seemed like an interesting racing game, combining more realistic racers to Mario Kart. I had pretty good hopes for it.

It’s been out for a while, and I finally got around to renting it, and after quite some play time, I just can’t get into it at all, and, as such, I’ll just give my impressions on the game, and explain why I don’t really like it, or at least why I don’t feel like it lived up to its incredible potential.

Read on!

What I liked in Blur
The game isn’t without its good points. The strongest point is the concept. I mean, a whole “what if Mario Kart used real cars, and took place in the real world” idea? That’s just awesome. Lots of things in the game are very well thought out. The different types of weapons and power-ups are fun and interesting to use, the multitude of objectives for each track is fun, there’s a variety of vehicles… It’s a recipe for awesomeness.

I also actually like the graphic style. I’m not a big fan of realistic graphics, but here it’s very fun to look at because of the non-realistic elements flawlessly added to the realistc parts, everything actually looks really good. While realistic, it still looks fun and colorful. Bizarre Creations really showed their stuff with this one.

I find that the items are pretty fun to use. Other than barge, shield, lightning and repair, weapons can be shot forward or backwards, even the turbo. You have the shunt, which homes in on enemies, the bolt goes straight until it hit someone or the walls, the turbo gives you either a speed boost or stopping power to take turns easier (though you never seem to have the turbo at the right moment for that anyways), the mine can be placed right behind you or shot in front of someone for a trap, barge hits anything really close to you, lightning places “lightning domes” in front of the first place racer… the items are really fun. Sure, they’re mostly variations on Mario Kart items, other than the lightning which is quite unique, or repair, but they still a blast to use. And I like that you can store up to 3 items, really useful feature. And the fact that there’s no Bullet Bill/Blue Shell equivalent is awesome.

So I’m up to talking about what I didn’t like about the game. But before that, I didn’t mention the Fan system, which is an okay way to progress through the game, unlocking vehicles as you do various things (hitting enemies, responding to fan requests, etc.) isn’t a bad system. And, really, I should mention that Blur could have been an AWESOME game if it wasn’t for the few problems, and I can’t see why people couldn’t enjoy the game without said problems.

Why I didn’t like the game
So what’s the biggest problem with the game? Well, there’s the fact that the controls are completely horrible. It’s like they weren’t sure if they should make realistic driving controls, or more arcade-style controls, so they did a bit of both but didn’t iron them out. The cars just handle horribly. Braking barely works so you always have to brake way too much in advance to actually slow down enough to take any slightly tight turn. Basically, your car barely turns at all if you’re not going slow enough… Which makes no sense. The hand brake… sort of varies. On grippy vehicles, it just slows you down a little bit. On drifty vehicles, it makes you lose control completely. Basically, the idea is to not use the hand brake at all, even if you want to drift (just brake/let go of the gas at proper times, the chances of getting a proper drift out is a lot higher). The precision, brake timing and angle of approach basically needs to be perfect if you want to clear any curve past the first part of the career without ramming into walls.

But a game requiring perfect precision for curves really screws things up when you add weapons to the mix. So you have a tight turn, and you’re going through it perfectly… until someone shoots you in the back, making you lose control and ram into the wall. And this happens all the time since there’s almost always items before curves. It just feels really crappy when you’re following the best possible racing line in a curve and you’re shut off by someone shooting you. If the game didn’t require so much precision I’d be fine with it, but because the steering sucks, you really have to apply yourself properly to turn, and that just doesn’t work when you have mines to avoid and projectiles to get away from. Yeah, projectiles coming from the back are really tough to avoid, I only managed to avoid a few shunts by total luck (or shields/barges). You can avoid shunts if you turn at the right time, but the timing needs to be so precise it’s not even worth trying.

So after a while I started getting used to the controls. It was still not ideal, but at least I figured out how to take turns as fast as I could without ramming into walls too much (other than when I got hit by weapons). But then I ran into another problem. The CPU is kinda cheap. For some reason, no matter what car I took (though I don’t have them all unlocked), they were always faster than me. And, also, they never screw up in a curve unless they get hit by a shunt. At the beginning of the game it’s not too bad, but, as you move on, you really have to go through each track perfectly, never getting hit and never touching a wall, or you’re not winning the race.

The other problem I have is a certain element in the programming… There’s something really weird going on here. So if you hit a wall hard enough, the game resets you on the track and puts you back in the right direction, though it does make you lose a bit of time. You also reset if you lose control of the car (which makes no sense, but let’s roll with it). The problem here is that it’s actually completely random. Sometimes you’ll hit a wall hard and not reset, making you waste even more time having to get back on track. Other times you’ll hit the wall hard while boosting, getting back on track fast despite the crash since you get back lost momentum from the turbo, but it will reset you anyways. And the game will sometimes reset you when it thinks you lost control, even if you haven’t (sometimes did it during drifts for me). There’s no excuse for such bad programming, testers exist for this type of thing, right?

Overall
Well, I won’t say Blur is a BAD game, but it’s nowhere near its full potential. If Bizarre Creations had taken some extra time to iron out the controls and the few problems it has, it would have been one of the best racing game of the year probably. But, as it stands, it’s just about on par with Split/Second, another racing game that fell short from the expectations I had.

jobocan Console, Games, impressions, PC, ps3, xbox 360