Disney/Pixar Cars

Thursday, 27 December 2007 00:00

When you see a film with Disney Pixar on it, you know it's going to be at least half-decent. Cars is the kind of film you would think was just for kids, but (I haven't seen the film) judging by content in the game, it also has the usual type stuff that the adult audience would appreciate.

It's essentially a racing game, but there are also tasks to be completed such as the first one in Story Mode, Lizzie's Postcard Hunt. It's pretty much what it's called, due to the game being free roaming, you can drive pretty much anywhere in a kind of Need for Speed Underground 2 type fashion.

You're in Radiator Springs, a small town that you're required to compete in races in an effort to build up enough cups to take part in more major races. As you compete and win events, more are opened up where you get to meet more of the characters and in certain events, unlock them. There is also a Bonus Points system where you can unlock a variety of things in the Bonus Content section of the main menu. Characters and paint jobs is just one part of the bonus content, but one of the more interesting things to unlock are the videos.

There are two sections in the Videos part, Deleted Scenes of which you can see scenes that were cut from the game and Movie Clips, which is pretty self-explanatary, selected clips from the movie. Finally, there's quite a bit of art to unlock, 13 character and 22 environment Rainbow Studio concept art images are there for you to unlock.

As you progress through Story Mode and complete events, they're also unlocked in the Arcade section, this is where you can play mini-games such as Tractor Tipping and High Speed Heist. The Road Races section has Grand Prix, Circuits and Challenges to have a go at and the Piston Cup races are where you can do those NASCAR type races again. Plenty of things to do when you've had enough of the story mode for a while and most can even be played in versus mode with the addition of Pit Stop Challenge. The challenge is to do the various pit stop tasks such as cleaning the windscreen, filling up and tightening wheel nuts as fast as you can, the one that does the most challenges at the end, wins.

As you're driving around, you'll see some gates and barriers you can't pass through, these can be removed once you've won some races and extend the amount of environment you access. This is where I mention what I thought were bad points and mentioning access brings me onto how you think you're able to drive over a certain part, but are blocked by an invisible barrier. When racing, if you happen to go off the track while taking a corner, you have 3 seconds to return on course or be reset on the track, that can be a bit annoying, but I suppose it stops people from taking stupidly short short cuts.

The controls aren't that subtle either, there isn't much of an arcadey feel to them and a slight touch will see you turning fairly sharply. Acceleration is in the form of pressing the X button, leaving the trigger buttons for other functions like powersliding, that's not too bad I suppose, I'm just used to using trigger buttons for accelerating and braking though. One of the things I found to be the quickest to annoy me was the comments other characters say as you pass them, I was almost ready to scream after hearing, "Can I get an autograph?" for the tenth time in a row on the same stretch of road. Last little gripe I have is the 'in car' view, instead of seeing through Lightening McQueen's eyes as a bonnet view, there's no bonnet (hood for the Americans). That's probably just me being petty, but due to where the characters eyes are placed, you would have expected the view through the eyes to include the bonnet.

This really isn't a bad game for a movie tie-in and although it won't satisfy the speed hungry racing fans out there, people that like driving games that require you to do more than just drive around doing race after race will like it too. The characters feature their voices from the film and the detail on the cars is great, although it's not that graphically spectacular, it's still nice, albeit maybe one or two glitches.

Gameplay will keep you going for at least 12+ hours with the Story Mode, Mini-games and Versus Mode, some good unlockable content and suitable for all ages, it may not be to everyone's taste, but I'd recommend trying it if you like the film. It does appear as though it's a hit as I'm doing this (late) review, it's actually top of the All Formats chart!

7.8