TGS 06: The Tousou Highway 2: Road Warrior 2050 Hands-On

TOKYO--There are two types of games at the Tokyo Game Show: those that you can't get near without standing in line for at least 30 minutes first, and those that, for whatever reason, appear to go largely unnoticed by the majority of attendees. Road Warrior 2050 from D3 is one of the latter, but not even booth signs mislabeling it as Road Warrior 2005 could deter us from checking it out.

Like the majority of D3's "simple" budget offerings, Road Warrior 2050 is a relatively simplistic game with visuals to match. When we picked up the PlayStation 2 controller in front of the game, we found ourselves in control of a heavily modified sports car that was capable of speeds of well over 200 km/h. That's what it said on the speedometer anyway--it actually felt closer to 20 km/h for the most part, and that's without taking into account the numerous occasions when the frame rate took a nosedive.

Our goal was simply to reach the end of a long and quite featureless highway before a time limit (which appeared to be about 10 hours, no joke) expired. The car handled more like a remote-controlled toy than a real vehicle, and so we were easily able to avoid the fallen bridges, roadblocks, and other obstacles that were presumably supposed to impede our progress. Enemies on motorbikes and in Mad Max-esque bad-guy cars made up most of the oncoming traffic, and although we had the option of shooting at them with the machine gun or the rocket launcher that our driver was armed with, it was a whole lot easier to just avoid them since they never caught up with us again afterward.

While messing with the controller's various buttons in an attempt to figure out some controls, we did discover that it's possible to climb out of the car and fight bad guys on foot, but doing so only slowed us down and was only slightly more engaging than the aforementioned long gray road. When we got to the end, after an uneventful six or seven minutes, we were told that we had achieved an "S" ranking on a screen that detailed our number of kills and some other statistics, and we were then shown a brief cutscene of a woman in a hospital bed. There's almost certainly a storyline in Road Warrior 2050 somewhere, then, but if the only way to experience it is to play through more levels like the one that we endured today, it's unlikely that we'll ever know what it's about.