Preface: So we completed this review over a month ago, but somehow it managed to slip under our radar and not get published. Sorry for getting this one out late!
I think we can all agree that the car combat genre is severely under-represented – even rarer are car combat games that are good. That being the case, whenever I see a car combat game pop up I have to play it. It’s like seeing a white squirrel or some other type of rare animal in the wild. So, naturally, I had to play Gas Guzzlers Extreme, and while it had a slow start, eventually it started turning into the game car combat fans need it to be.
To start, however, Gas Guzzlers Extreme commits one of the greatest video game sins (at least to me): starting you up super-powered and then taking that away from you. Your very first race will be in a fast, heavily-armed and armored car; which gives you a great taste of what’s to come. You see a great range of weapons, the aggressive AI, and a track that’s fun to drive and fight on. However, as soon as that is done, your awesome ride is taken away from you and replaced with a beater. From this point forward you need to obtain new cars by purchasing them after they’ve been unlocked.
You get the money by winning races and also completing additional race objectives like taking out a certain opponent before the end of the race or using a specific type of power-up a certain number of times. You can also increase the amount of cash you get by getting sponsors, which are attracted to you the more races you win.
You can customize each vehicle not only in looks, but also in performance. You can enhance the armor, buy different types of weapon, increase ammo count, and upgrade various stats like acceleration, top speed, and braking. I found that the amount of money I was winning in races between getting 1st place, hitting optional objectives, and sponsor cash afforded me the ability to get a new car every four to five races, but the catch is that your upgrades do not transfer from vehicle to vehicle, so typically I would need to repurchase upgrades over the course of a few races. Most cars you buy will already have better acceleration, ammo count, etc. than their predecessors, but you will need the upgrades if you want to take them to their limits.
After the initial tease, the game starts out a bit slow. The cars are slow and not fun to drive, your weapon selection is not only sparse, but the amount of ammo you carry is very low as well. It’s frustrating when you go through your entire ammo supply, leaving a car with ¼ of its health, only to have the car find a repair power-up before you’re able to find an ammo pickup. On top of that, most of the weapons you have shoot fast. You’ll easily run through all of your machine gun ammo within ten seconds while playing through the beginning of the game.
There are multiple race types, and one of them, Power Race, doesn’t have weapons at all. With no shooting or explosions to keep me occupied, I found that the track design wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t that great either. Tracks are pretty easy to navigate and don’t require much racing skill to win. There are many shortcuts on each map, but they aren’t the easiest to spot. I would have been hard pressed to find some of these shortcuts, but the AI uses them as well, so it doesn’t take long to figure them out when you see someone else going into or out of one. The biggest threat to you in those races is the aggressive AI, which sometimes seems more sloppy than aggressive during those races as it feels like they are accidentally running into you sometimes. There are power-ups and deployable weapons such as mines and oil slicks in these races as well, but most of the time they are easy to dodge. In a game where car combat is the focus, I’m not looking to play a mode that takes those weapons away.
Other race modes you find in the beginning like Battle Race’ or Knock Out have weapons. Battle Race is your standard three lap race where your goal is to place first, but you can destroy opponent vehicles to knock them out of the race to make things easier for you. In Knock Out, a racer is knocked out of the race at the end of each lap. There are eight racers, and some of the tracks are big, so these races can take a while. I think the developer is looking for you to destroy cars with your weapons in addition to last place getting knocked out.
As the game progresses, additional race modes open up like Last Man Standing, where you are in an arena instead of a track and need to be the last surviving driver in an all-out brawl. You also get special races through your sponsors. Sometimes the races are just standard races where you are given a specific car, while others may be special game types like Capture the Flag. Either way, I did find the sponsor races to typically be both refreshing and enjoyable.
Besides money, each race awards you points that push you up the ranking in whatever cup you’re racing in. Once you hit the top you are invited to a tournament that will push you into the next cup upon winning. As you move from cup to cup you will get new types of races like I mentioned earlier. I didn’t start enjoying the game until I got into the second cup, and getting there took a bit longer than I thought it should. At least, by the time you get to the second cup you should have at least one decent car that’s fun to drive, a better range of weapons, and should be able to hold a substantial amount of ammo. Also, new tracks start to pop up that are a bit more fun and challenging to drive.
The beginning cup wasn’t bad – it just wasn’t very fun to play. To be honest, if I wasn’t reviewing the game I probably would have stopped playing the game too early to even get to the part where I started to enjoy it. I know most racing games start off a bit slow, but they don’t have to. A perfect example for me is Blur. The first set of races in Blur were simple, but still entertaining to play as the cars were fun to drive and the combat was good. It helped ease the player into the game, but at the same time made sure the player was still having fun.
One thing that I did enjoy about the game was the soundtrack. While it isn’t the greatest, it does have some good racing tracks that range from rock to electronic. The game also lets you choose the voice of your driver, and since Arnold Schwarzenegger was a choice, for me it was the only choice. I was not disappointed. The game also doesn’t skimp on the visuals. Both the cars and the environments look great, and the developer did a solid job making sure the tracks you race on feel like they are part of the environment in most cases, and not cut out specifically for that race. For example, while racing in the desert you may not see a lot of rails guiding you where you’re supposed to go, but you’ll see beat up wooden signs on the side of rock faces to let you know the right way.
If you give it some time, Gas Guzzlers Extreme should satisfy car combat fans. There isn’t much here if you want Grid or Need for Speed style racing, but like I said, the focus is on car combat and not the tracks themselves. Multiplayer is available if you want to play with someone else, but it will probably need to be a friend since I saw no one playing multiplayer when I checked it out. Gas Guzzlers Extreme is a good game with a slow start, so long as you can get over the hump.
