ECTS: Top Gear Daredevils Hands-On

Kemco had the latest build of its city-based PlayStation 2 racing game Top Gear Daredevil in playable form at its booth and we took it for a spin. The good news is that it looks and plays much better than the E3 version. The bad news is that it is still not very entertaining. The overall gameplay dynamics work well enough. The player has to drive around a replica of a real city, such as Tokyo or San Francisco, and must collect items while dealing with traffic and other obstacles. Unfortunately, all of that is executed very poorly.

The cars handle sluggishly and even the fastest ones, like the Porsche or Lotus replicas, take ages to reach their top speeds. This slows down the racing action drastically, when compared to other games in the genre. Also, the traffic feels lifeless. It almost seems as if zombies are driving the peripheral cars, as they rarely exhibit realistic driving techniques. To make matters worse, whenever the player even slightly bumps into another car it completely stops and sits there until the player swerves around. This can cause a lot of headaches as more than once we found ourselves being stuck between two computer-controlled cars, as they refused to react in any way.

At this point, the control options in the game are also very limited. The X button controls acceleration and any of the other face buttons can be used as the brakes - there is no option for using a hand brake. The shoulder buttons are all used to switch between various camera angles, only a few of which are actually functional during gameplay.

Top Gear Daredevil has several graphical flaws. Although not quite as bad as the E3 build, there are serious problems with the collision detection. Constantly we found ourselves driving through barriers and other cars. The car models themselves are only broad replicas of the chassis with very few body details. The same can be said for the game's environments. Kemco attempted to re-create cities such as San Francisco, but at this point there are very few recognizable details in the surroundings.

Although this latest build of Top Gear Daredevil is fairly improved over the E3 version, the game still needs a lot of work. It will be interesting to see how Kemco improves on the AI of the other drivers, the collision detection, the texturing, and the driving pace of the game.