Ready
for high-flying off-road action in a huge assortment of the world's
most rugged trucks and SUVs? Wanna get your groove on with intense
pedal-stomping, fender-bending vehicular mayhem? Dying to check out
exotic and dangerous courses all over the world? You are? Really? Cool.
Now all you've gotta do is wait for a game that delivers all that stuff -
because Test Drive: Off-Road 2 sure doesn't.
In
all fairness (and I'm always fair, right?), off-roading might not be
the ideal sport to try to base a game around - or at least not in the
hyperfrantic over-the-top style Accolade chose for Off-Road 2. Most of
your time is spent with the accelerator smashed to the floor as you
bounce all over the track, brushing up against invisible walls and
careening back onto the course. Yeah, you get to ram other trucks and
jeeps, and you get to make some really big jumps - but so what? It's an
empty feeling no matter how much air you catch or how many times the rad
commentator says "Awesome!" or "Sweeeet!"
But
even if extreme off-roading would make for a great game, Test Drive:
Off-Road 2 comes up short in so many different areas that it wouldn't
matter anyway. There's a total of 12 tracks, but it's really six times
two - running a course backward is counted as a separate track. Only
four of those can be raced until you place high enough in competition,
but when you do that, the first new track that's revealed is - you
guessed - one of those four in reverse.
There's
a whole mess of cars here - some are locked out until you prove
yourself, of course - but absolutely zero specs on what you can expect
out of them when you hit the dirt. Terrain graphics are a woolly tangle
of polygons and pixels, and the cars are plain-Jane renderings on a par with the pickup truck
at the start of Redneck Rampage. Get an eyeful of this stuff, and
you'll be wondering how the same company that put out the great-looking
Test Drive 5 could try to pawn this outmoded PlayStation game on
unsuspecting fans of arcade-style racing. Toss in some high weirdness
with the frame rate - it's either really choppy or the graphics just
make it seem that way - and engine sound effects that sound like Keith
Emerson's first attempt at playing a Moog, and you've basically got
nothing worth watching here unless you want to admire the digitized 2D images of lifeguards or Arabs on camels.
Topping
it all off is one of the laziest interface designs I've had the
displeasure of dealing with in a long time. Want a first-person
perspective? Fine - you don't get a hood, wheel, or speedometer, just a
ground-level view of those dubious terrain graphics. That worked OK in
Test Drive 5, but in Off-Road 2 it makes it look like you're tearing
through the desert on a jet-powered luge.
Then
again, you might have trouble finding that first-person perspective
because the manual doesn't tell you what the views (0-7) are; you've got
to load up a race and check it out
until you get the one you want. Feel like changing button assignments?
Too bad - there's no option to assign any commands to keys or buttons. I
know, you want to check out the instant replay and savor some of those
killer jumps you made in the last race - but you're out of luck again
because there's absolutely no instant replay whatsoever.
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