Review – Jeremy McGrath’s Offroad

Racing

It’s gripped.  Sorted.

Rich

I don’t know about your friend list on Xbox Live, but on mine there aren’t a whole lot of people playing driving games.  Occasionally I’ll see someone playing Forza (and I’ll remove them) and occasionally DiRT (blame Cockmasters for that stylising, not me) but for 99.999% of the time no-one is playing this sort of thing, especially the offroad kind.  Which makes you wonder, why are there so many of the fucking things then?

Arms raised in a V. The dead lay in pools of maroon below.

Despite the usual genre trappings of rubber-banding AI, hard to see corners and the very real fear of crashing into a boulder just as you’re about to win, I quite like this sort of thing usually.  Mainly thanks to Jeremy’s first outing on the PS1 which had lovely handling that required you to really shape your landings, almost Trials HD style.

This game however gets that one fundamental thing wrong.  You never really ‘feel’ the track.  Instead the game feels like you are riding on a small invisible cloud just above the track and the floaty physics lack any sort of weight.  The racing works well enough (the AI is mindless but not too cheaty) but the limited number of tracks and game modes barely justify the 800M$P asking price and with the likes of Pure and Fuel turning up fure roughly the same price in the shops quite often, you’d be better off getting one of those.  Specifically Fuel as it has lovely sunsets.  LOVELY SUNSETS.

Rating: 4/10