Road Rash

Developer - Electronic Arts
Publisher - Electronic Arts
Players - 1
Extras - Memory card

The bit on the box

"Ultra fast, no holds barred street racing: punch and kick your way through the opposition at speeds so fast they'll make your eyes hurt. Race through over 24 photo-realistic levels. Wanna go faster? Upgrade your bike to Rat, Sport or Super class. Features soundtracks from A&M's hottest alternative rock bands, including Soundgarden."

Graphics

Road Rash looks quite dated in comparison to other titles in the PlayStation racing genre, with graphic detail very reminiscent of ESPN Extreme Sports, but with motorcycles rather than skateboards and roller blades. One thing it does have however is a superb sense of speed which can get quite manic whilst weaving between the traffic found on the roads you race on (traffic consisting of badly drawn 2D sprites unfortunately). Animation is nothing to write home about either using very few frames for fighting moves and crashes. This title's looks really hark back to the old days of the 16 bit systems, so may appeal to nostalgia freaks.

Sounds

The sound effects in the game are adequate at best with buzzy sounding engine noises and the odd crunch and sliding sound when you crash. There is also a small amount of speech while racing with pedestrians shouting "take that" and "eat this" as they try and knock you off your bike, but these comments are barely heard unless the player actually switches off the engine noise via the options menu, therefore being a pointless addition to the already sparse effects. The in-game music is also very ordinary, and it is a pity EA did not use the great music tracks that accompany the opening options menus, with such songs from Soundgarden and Hammerbox among others.

Gameplay

Simplicity is the aim of this game, which is the basic objective of winning at any cost. The player can chose between a small selection of different characters, a choice that doesn't really effect gameplay in any way, and then take to the streets and race to win, fighting rival riders and policemen along the way. Finishing in the top three qualifies you in that race category and after qualifying in five races you get to go up to the next level, and race them all again, but this time in longer courses. This unfortunately makes the game repetitive and hardly inspires the player to progress very far into the game. Winning money in races also leads to trading in your bike for a new improved model, and there is a decent amount of difference between each type of motorcycle to warrant doing so.

I feel a verdict coming on

Most people will have a blast playing this game at first, but with repetitive levels and no multi-player feature Road Rash is probably doomed to remain only on the shelves of die-hard fans of the series. More could have been done to spruce up the game's transfer to the 32 bit systems but this is basically a straight port from the 3DO version. Hopefully in the future we'll see more features such as being able to tweak the mechanics of your motorcycle, and more freedom over what weapons your character can use throughout a race. Might be a nice rental but only if you like this sort of thing, and don't mind older looking games.

Review by D.R.T.Barrett