In 2010 I played the demo of what was going to become one of my favourite games of all time. It didn’t have the twisting storyline that I usually look for when purchasing a game; it didn’t have gameplay that was polished to a mirror shine and it wasn’t from a developer that had produced a game I had ever been excited about. Yet after a mere twenty minutes of playing the demo, I was hooked.
The game in question is Split/Second: Velocity, an action racer from the company that brought us The Lion King and Mickey Mouse. Yep, that company is indeed Disney, albeit Black Rock Studios, a sub-facet of Disney Interactive, its still Disney. In 2011 I learned that despite its surprising positive reviews, Disney gave up on the franchise, and a sequel to the ‘smashy smashy boom boom’ racer, (the category I made up in order to further compartmentalise this game) sank below the horizon, never to be seen again.
In the light that this is probably the only Split/Second game to ever be made I would like to take some time to give it some verbal affirmation, an obituary if you like, marking the (almost) anniversary of when my heart was broken (slightly. It’s alright, I’m not a moron. I know it’s just a game).
So why did this game capture my heart? Was it the graphics, the innovation? Well the graphics and cinematic quality were pretty good for a game of its type. The way the camera shook and swayed from side to side and even got dirt on it when opponents took turns trying to clobber your vehicle with a wrecking ball, a missile or god forbid, a building, added to the excitement and the TV show premise that the creators were trying to portray (which was cemented by a “Next time on Split/Second” at the end of a section and “On today’s Split/Second” at the beginning). The innovation that the game contained was clever but by no means did it push boundaries. The augmented reality heads up display had been used to an extent previously and the idea of an arcade action racer has been around for a really long time, however the most innovative part of the game was in fact the weapons system. Gone were the days of sliding your car into a pickup to generate a random weapon on the side of it; in Split/Second, the track was your weapon. When your car jumped and drifted it would build up power (shown in a bar behind your vehicle) and as you careered round the roads, you could use some (or all) of this power. “But what would you get in exchange?” I hear you cry. In exchange you would receive an explosive barrel that was dropped from a helicopter onto the cars in front; a fireball that would rip the side of a building off and send your opponents to the scrapheap and in some cases, a 747 that would hurtle down the track wrecking anything in its path. Half the fun was trying to work out what would be set off by pressing “fire” at the right moment.
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| When this first happens to you, there are no words to describe how you feel. Apart from "crap." |
Despite this excellent display of creativity my favourite element was what gamers tend to hate: dying. In most games of this quality, getting involved in a situation that would inevitably leave your car in a worse state than Greece’s economy, would trigger a Burnout Paradise-esque cutscene, depicting the last thrilling moments of your vehicle’s life. In Split/Second it was different. If you were speeding towards a crumbling building the game would let you live every millisecond of that crash up until the point of impact, and as soon as you hit, the cutscene would kick in, fooling you into thinking that next time it happened you could make it. The result was that sometimes you did make it. Holding off on notifying the player that they were done, for an extra hundredth of a second, suddenly made close calls and escapes more possible, more intense and a whole lot more exciting.
The other part of the game I really want to affirm is the difficulty. It was quite a shallow learning curve, it was not hard to get good at the game, by all means it wasn’t easy but let’s just say it was no Dark Souls. This meant that once you had beaten the game and had decided that you wanted to venture into the world of multiplayer, the learning curve suddenly shifted its gradient. Since everybody online was good at the game it became a whole lot more competitive, everybody knew how to dodge your attacks and you knew how to dodge theirs. Learning changed from finding out what happens when you trigger an attack on this part of the track, to finding out how you can trigger an attack on this part of the track without it missing.
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| Ah. I knew I should have checked myself. |
I could talk for a long time about all the things I loved about this game. I won’t because I believe experiencing some of these things first hand is the only way to love them. I will say one more thing, something which I think summarises the real tragedy of the cancellation of the Split/Second franchise:
I am proud to say that I was once a rank 1 player, I put the game down for about six weeks and when I picked it up again I dropped immediately to rank 66, and you know what? I loved every second of it. If you put down a game for a year, come back to it and are still amazing then that’s fine, games are basically toys after all. If however you put down a game for a month, come back to it and you are awful, then that’s not a toy. That’s a damn sport!
I’ll see you next time, on Split/Second.
