Praise the lord, our prayers have been answered! I was waiting for
this for a long time. The last futuristic racer we've been "blessed"
with was Millennium Racer, and although it was a racer, and
indeed futuristic, it was hardly worthy of the 'Millennium' title. I
wouldn't even mention other racers, partly because they don't fit
the genre, and also because they were far from spectacular
(Swamp Buggy Racer comes to mind *puke*). Of course, Need For
Speed: Porsche Unleashed was released shortly before this, but
then again, that's not exactly futuristic. So if you've had enough of
driving along the palm trees in the twilight, while the wind blows
through your hair, and the setting sun reflects in your designer sun
glasses, maybe you should take a ride with Rollcage. Blow some
opponent's ass with your driller rocket while driving on the ceiling
of that tunnel at 450 mph.
Still not convinced? Well, let's see what this baby has in stock.
First - the graphics (*drool*). You want your dynamic lights? You
got 'em! Want your dynamic environments? Done! Explosions,
weather effects, dust? All there... and the sky, my god, the sky!
Sometimes I just feel like letting others blow my ass sky-high just
so I could look at that marvalous sky! Imagine all this at 1024x768
resolution (yes, yes, I know it goes higher, but I was blessed with a
monitor that can only go as high). It of course does feature 32 bit
colour (providing that you have one of them nice nVidia cards) but
it looked just as good on my Voodoo3 3500. No frame rate loss, not
even when the time warp effect was on, or when the buildings
explode around you. Speaking of the time warp effect, have you
ever been high on shrooms? Well, this is what it feels like it. Can
make you dizzy, but then again, we like that no?
Next comes the sound. The game supports all the major current 3D
environmental APIs, and although I played it with an A3D Vortex 2
soundcard, I experienced some problems while playing, so I
defaulted to the regular software driver. One other great thing
about this is the soundtrack. Rollcage features 12 drum'n'bass /
jungle tracks from a pretty nice collection of UK and worldwide
artists. This is pretty standard for this type of game, but it's very
fitting nonetheless.
The gameplay is where this title excels at. As I said before, we
haven't had a lot of good futuristic racers lately. So going back to
the good old ceiling driving and opponent shooting that we liked
so much in the original Rollcage isn't that bad after all. Of course,
there's about 5 game modes to choose from, namely: League (Win
tracks based on points), Arcade (play on any of the tracks opened
in league mode against 4 opponents), Time Attack, Training (on 10
special training tracks), Scramble (finish a track under a give time),
Survivor (like league, but with no continues), All tracks and
Demolition (Destroy all objects on track in shortest time possible). It
also supports split screen (when was the last time we've seen
THAT in a PC game) or netowrk and TCP/IP multiplayer.
The only drawback is the steep learning curve for the controls, but
once you get used to it this game is a blast, literally.
20/20
13/15
28/30
19/20
2/5
9/10