Death Rally

Remakes and reboots can be a dangerous thing as problem with the concept is that no matter what you produce, it will without fail be compared to the original and because of this, those reviewing it have a bias going in. If the previous incarnation was a liquid brown volcano that someone produced from both exits on a drunken night out, then odds are its going to be looked on with the benefit of the doubt because the only way to go is up. However if you going up against what many consider to be the second coming of Christ, then you are probably going to be in trouble and this is what the new Death Rally for the iPhone/iPad is going up against.

The original PC game released in 1996 by Remedy is something that I would honestly described as one of the highlights of my childhood. The true joy that came with this game that it was so incredibly simple and refined as shown in the video above (this is not me playing btw, just a gameplay clip I found on YouTube). You race around a track from a top down perspective and try to win the race in an armoured car loaded with guns and picking up cash, speed boosts and extra ammo to make sure you end up crossing the finish line first and your enemies go from 60 to 0 in “What the fuck happened?”

Even the story followed a simple enough concept; choose a racer and work your way up the rankings before facing the final boss, the unoriginally named “Adversary.” Throughout you can take on side jobs before going into a race and get bonus cash should you complete the objective, or possibly lose it if your a complete numbskull. Money raised allows you to purchase upgrades and new cars so you’re not always battling to keep up with those higher in the rankings but I always took great pleasure in waiting until the last possible moment to upgrade my car as there was a great level of satisfaction in knowing that the the rear end of my car which was about as attractive as a plumber’s arse and as powerful as those during the Flintstone era was in front of everyone else.

So Hit-by-car Rallycross had a lot to live up to and I would like to say that it lived up to my expectations; but it didn’t. In fairness, it wasn’t one critical error that cost it everything, but rather a culmination of many small issues, which I might have been able to overlook if this was my first outing in the series. First issue of the day is that of the story, or lack of it. It starts with you trying to outrun the cops and inevitably fail at which point you are told to participate in street racing and work your way to defeat your old adversary…..Adversary. But after that Arson Drag has no structure what so ever, leaving you only to randomly pick races in an effort to move forward. It’s like a old wooden bridge, you can choose which plank to step on next and you are always going to go forwards, but there is no guarantee that your foot isn’t going to fall and take your body with it. And once you get to the end and defeat Adversary, nothing happens. I should point out that in this circumstance I consider defeating Adversary as beating him in a one on one race; a way that makes sense to my gigantic brain and it’s possible that the makers want me to blow his car to kingdom come instead but fuck that for a joke since his car seems to be an tank equipped with about V3000 engine.

*Amendment – I actually did manage to blow the final driver, Adversary, to the land of smoke and ruins about 3 hours after finalising this review and apart from an achievement which every game seems a desperate need to have lest it be considered inferior, nothing happened. I ask you Murder-Suicide Moto GP, what do you want me to do to defeat this guy? Take him out to dinner, talk his through his issues andconvince him that his life of street racing will lead him to nothing but disaster until he finally breaks down in my arms, saying he’ll never race again.*

Next is the maps and whilst I cannot deny that the graphics are brilliant, they become are so cluttered, anything beyond the simplest track and it becomes difficult to determine what is drivable track and what’s a bit of shrubbery that’s going to clip your car and send it spinning faster than a rocket fueled Merry-go-round. They are also incredibly short and the number of laps are few meaning that unless you keep up with the leader past the first corner, the amount of time you have to catch up and snatch first place is roughly the same as the attention span of a teenager whose just discovered masturbation.

Pickups are a bastard to grab since they are all contained within boxes that can easily get pushed to the edge of the track and must be hit several times with any form of weaponry before they can be obtained. Not a real issue when you are launching 7 missiles at the car in front and unfortunately miss and hit cardboard instead but a huge pain in the ass when you need a bit of nitro to get first place and it’s stuck on the side of the road in a box made out of a cardboard-adamantium alloy.

The controls are a bit of a bastard too since they don’t rely on the tilting thing; rather it has a crude joystick arrangement which I was thankful for initially since the whole tilting thing doesn’t work on public transport in peak hour unless you’re very insistent of having the eyes of every person within 2 feet of you having a very intimate encounter with your elbows. But after a while it just become frustrating, particularly when Robbery-gone-wrong Offroad changes the camera style on you as part of of a cruel challenge, a challenge not dis-similar to doing 20 chin-ups on a bar smeared with shit. You might be able to do it but it sure as hell isn’t going to be pleasant.

But what probably annoys me the most is how the whole thing is absurdly unbalanced no matter what car you drive or how upgraded it is.  Even at the end when I had the fastest possible car with everything upgraded to full with the best weapons attached, I would still regularly come second as one bollard would get in my way right at the start of the race and I couldn’t catch up to the leader through a combination of the aforementioned issues and the fact the car in front always seemed to just be that little bit faster than my own.

So what can say I about Heart Attack Formula One in the end. Had I not played the original or if this was the game’s first incarnation I might be more willing to give it leniency for its failings but they are things I simply cannot ignore.  However in the end there is one good thing to take out of all this. It’s amusing to see a game with all the benefit of current day technology behind it could still be outclassed by something that ran on DOS.