Games review: Blur

Blur is an odd mix of the Project Gotham and Mario kart games, not odd in concept, but odd in that it hasn't been done many times before.

JOE

By Shane Willoughby at thegamingliberty.com

Blur at heart is an odd mix of the Project Gotham and Mario kart games, not odd in concept, but odd in that it hasn’t already been done many times before – after all I can’t think of a time in my life where the idea of bringing together real licensed cars, real places and crazy power up-driven combat hasn’t sounded totally awesome.Â So how does this unanimously-declared awesome concept deliver?

All of the tracks you get to drive around are loosely based on real world locations and look fantastic, as do the cars and the power up effects that light up the tracks with neon fireworks and ripples of plasma.

Each and every track has many alternate paths that cris-cross each other, are well designed and add a larger sense of variety to the races – some sections may be shorter but not necessarily faster as there may be better power ups located on another section, or a particular section may end with a less-than-optimal approach angle to an upcoming corner.

There’s a wide range of cars split into classes A to D and, as I’ve mentioned earlier, they look great and as you’d expect from a racer, each has strengths and weaknesses in different areas – each car is given a stat describing the general feel of the car (i.e. “Drifty”, “Grippy”, “Balanced”, etc) and a rating in acceleration, speed, grip, health and handling difficulty.

Variety over realism

Game developers Bizarre have done away with measurements of horsepower and torque etc, replacing it all with simple bars to illustrate performance in each area and liberties have been taken with the real-life racing qualities of each car, this lowers the realism but enables races to include a much wider variety of cars. In my opinion this is very welcome as it really suits this type of game.

The balance of realism in the handling of the cars is perfect for the style of the game. You couldn’t call it in any way realistic but at the same time you can’t just keep your accelerator on the floor and expect to win.

It’s realistic enough that racing lines and taking corners well are important, but not realistic enough that you’ll be punished hard for not doing so – this is a great decision as at times it’s incredibly hard to stick to the track let alone a racing line because of all the mines on the road and projectiles to avoid!

Speaking of the power ups, here’s what is available to you:

Shunt – a homing ball of plasma that locks on to the car in front of you, explodes on contact and flips the target.
Barge – a close range attack that emits a shockwave of energy which pushes other cars near you away at great force.
Bolt – multiple unguided projectiles that try to cause the car they hit to lose control.
Shock – Blur’s “Blue Shell attack” that summons pillars of electricity in front of the leading car. They can be avoided, but cause an EMP-style effect if driven through.

And finally Mines, Nitro, Repair and Shield do exactly what they say on the tin – but all of the power ups that fire forward can also be fired backwards (and vice-versa) which opens up a lot of depth and strategy in the combat.

For example, an incoming Shunt projectile can be destroyed by firing another projectile backwards or dropping a mine in front of it, and the Nitro boost can also be deployed backwards, stopping you dead and causing a ‘rift’ that will make other drivers lose control before launching you off at top speed again. This is extremely handy if you take a sharp corner far too fast.

The single-player career consists of a typical group of events – races, destruction and checkpoint – with a one-on-one ‘boss’ challenge available if you meet all the necessary criteria. To unlock further groups of events you must compete in the available ones to try to gain ‘lights.’

There are a number of lights available for each event, most of them are gained by finishing within the top 3 and the others are bonus lights that are only achieved by gaining a set number of ‘fans’ and completing ‘fan runs’ in the event.

Fans are Blur’s equivalent of Kudos points and determine what vehicles are available to you. They are mainly gained by landing power ups on your opponents, however there are extra challenges dotted around each event – ‘Fan Challenges’ and ‘Fan Runs’.

When you drive through the Fan Run icon, a set of gates and a timer appears and you must drive through all the gates to complete the run. You’ll earn more fans the quicker you complete a run and you’ll get the event’s Fan Run light if you place in the top 3.

Fan Challenges give you an immediate objective (like performing a great drift, hitting an opponent with a certain power up whilst drifting, hitting a ramp and getting some impressive air, etc) that on completion give you a large bonus to your fans, again the faster you complete the challenge the more fans you’ll receive.

Another inventive feature is that after every event you’re given the option to save your result as a Friend Challenge that can be sent to up to 3 friends at a time, challenging them to do better than you on the same event and using the same car – if theyaccept the challenge they can record their result and send you the challenge back. But despite all of this, Blur’s single player still feels rather underwhelming.

I think the main reason for this is that the checkpoint and destruction events have little appeal and aren’t very entertaining – it’s the races you want to play. Unfortunately these other events make up about half of the rather short career.Â It’s clearly simply a primer for the multiplayer, which is the real meat of the game.

The 20-player online races are often an awesome, yet unrelenting haze of neon carnage, both beautiful and brutal.Â It’s fast, fun and there’s never a dull race – whilst it can, of course, be frustrating at times but that pretty much comes with the territory and isn’t really the game’s fault.

Strange but brilliant

In a strange but brilliant design choice, the multiplayer has been set up in a similar vein to Call of Duty. There are playlists, challenges and mod load outs, and it all works very well indeed. Like the single-player mode, you level up in multiplayer by gaining fans, unlocking new cars, challenges and mods, and the challenges themselves are sets of objectives to meet in online races that pay out a large bonus of fans on completion.

Mod load outs are similar to the classes in the COD games – you have 3 mod slots and a selection of mods that perform a variety of differing roles that you can choose from – among the more straightforward mods are things such as attacks that do more damage, there’s some really inventive ones such as giving your shield the ability to not just prevent an attack from hitting you, but absorbing it and giving it to you as a power up to use, or scrambling an opponent’s power up bay and preventing them attacking, but only if you hit them by firing a power up backwards.

Mods can really make a difference on the track and provide a much deeper level to your tactics when racing. There’s even a ‘prestige’ style feature included – if you hit the maximum level in multiplayer, you can choose to have your rank and challenges reset to zero in return for a special “legend” car, of which there are 10. To attain them all you’re going to have to put in a monumental amount of time!

Also, a special mention goes to the 4-player split screen racing option – it’s a rarity nowadays but it’s great to see the social-couch-gamers provided for, especially as these types of games are generally made more fun in the knowledge that you can punch your opponents… and they can punch you! (Disclaimer: TGL does not condone undeserved violence.)

Blur is a hugely entertaining game, but what you’ll get out of it depends on what you’re expecting – if you’re wanting a realistic driving sim, I’d give this a miss (and question what rock you’ve been living under to be expecting realism), if you’re not a fan of playing games online you may come away disappointed with the single player career, but if you’re looking for a solid combat racer to play online then Blur delivers in spades.Â Neon spades.