TOP GEAR OVERDRIVE
SHORT VERSION: More like Top Gear Undercooked! A poor person’s Beetle Adventure Racing, this racer starts out great but begins to break at the seams the longer you play.
LONG VERSION: This game has some great stuff going for it! First of all, the vibes… it has an aesthetic from this era that I love, where the tracks are shown at different times such as dawn, sunset, night (and different seasons in this case, too). Each time gives the tracks a very different mood (helped by the fantastic skyboxes), with dawn being my favourite due the purple/blue lighting. The blurry textures add to the mood, adding a dreamy haze over everything, like you just woke up and are about to go on an adventure or returning from one.
Porsche Unleashed for the PC was the peak of this aesthetic, IMO.
These moods are NOT matched by the soundtrack, which was all done by a Soundgarden knock-off called Grindstone, who supplied generic 90s alt rock. I ended up just turning it off and playing my own music.
The framerate is smooth (in lo-res mode), impressive considering how great the game looks for N64. It plays well, too! Well, at first.
See, there are some big issues that hold this back… first of all, there is only “championship” mode. No time trials or such, probably because the cars are all unbalanced due to how progression works.
See, you earn money for placing 4th or higher (also that’s the only way you progress past a race), which can then be used to either upgrade your car (or buy extra nitro) or buy a better car… so each newly available car is “better” than the previous to justify this system, hence no balance.
The championship mode is one loonnggg campaign, by the way. No starting at different seasons, just erasing and starting from scratch. Again, I suspect due to the progression system.
There IS a versus mode, that lets you play one track that you’ve already won in championship mode, but that’s the only other option. Both modes support 1 to 4 players, which is nice.
You’re also playing catch-up from the start of every race… you always start at 12th, with 1st waayyy far ahead on the track. I suspect it’s either to make up for lackluster AI and/or not being able to show a grid of cars due to how many polygons would be onscreen at once.
This means that finding and using the shortcuts on each level is compulsory to catch up (assuming the shortcut actually IS faster). It felt less like I was racing, and more that I was just trying to optimise my path as much as possible. If you miss a shortcut, or blow your car up, you may as well just restart the race (especially later on when it becomes much harder to place 4th or higher).
And you’ll blow up A LOT. Sometimes seemingly at random! Sometimes I’ll just lightly tap another car and BOOM (they’ll be fine, though). Sometimes you’ll bounce off a wall, other times it will blow you up. Literally NOTHING blew me up on the beach level several times, which seems to be an especially glitchy track.
This gets worse as you upgrade the cars, since you start going so fast and your vehicle feels uncontrollable. This made blowing up more common, and also made it harder to slide down shortcuts.
Also why do the CPU cars pick up the money on the road?! They don’t need it!! It’s just punishment for having a car in front of you.
Anyway, it came down to constantly restarting… thankfully the game lets you instantly restart with no consequence, a HUGE saving grace. So I kept restarting and restarting… now, I don’t mind games like Trackmania where you do that because it’s always just you optimising your path and such, and this felt similar.
BUT… in this game, there are 11 other cars strewn across the track. They add a huge variable aside from your own skill, adding too much chaos, and often I would screw up just because there was another car in my way.
When I realised this, it sucked all the fun from the game, and I lost interest and stopped.
So yeah, great vibes and I was having a good time for the first few seasons of the championship, but it eventually devolved into an exercise of chaotic tedium. I really did like those first few seasons, though!
BONUS COMPLAINT: When you buy a new car, the rubber banding of the CPUs also upgrades, so its best to stick with the previous car until you have enough money to upgrade the new one from the base model. You’ll definitely have to change to the new one to stand a chance eventually, though.