Once you choose a track you never go back. No seriously you don't, it crashes.
- Amazingly Humourous
The Bad:
- Uncountable Bugs
- Frame Rate Problems
- Terrible Physics
- Very Limited Cars And Tracks
- AI Vitrually Doesn't Exist
- Terrible English Skills (Your Winner!)
Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing, a game filled with astonishing bugs and glitches you never thought imaginable in a game. Even The Simplest of actions such as braking and reversing are broken. Finding it hard to drive round the track? Don't worry, you can drive right over mountains without a care in the world. And the checkpoints? You don't need them And what about your oppenents? They'll just sit there at the start line waiting for you to finish. The only way to loose is to re-code the game yourself.
Before we start I will give you a brief overveiw of the game. You are a truck driver, who may have taken ecstacy pills and charged his engine up so much it goes faster in reverse. Its hard to do a serious review on this game, nothing seems to be done right, heck even the buildings you can drive through. Stella Stone, though you may get rather famous for making the game that has been dubbed 'the worst game ever', thats not a good achievement.
Lets say you had never heard of this game before, or its reviews and you found it in the bargain bin for £2.99 at your local gamestation store. You would expect an enjoyable truck racer with a good driving feel. The first thing you are met with in Big Rigs is the terrible controls. There not complicated, just so simple it hurts. If your used to playing racing games like Hot Pursuit and Shift 2, Were your expecting A for accelerate, V for brakes and the arrows to move and drift. It may be harsh to compare two modrn next-gen games to this older gen game, but controls haven't changed much. You only take use of the arrow keys in Big Rigs, and don't worry about braking, a quick tap of the back arrow and you stop instantly. Instantly. No gradual stopping, you just stop, this game has terrible physics.
Speaking of physics, the next thing you may notice is that you can drive up mountains. That's not new, but when your wheels are virtually stuck like glue to the floor, and doesn't slow down at all thats a little out of the ordinary. And as your going down you'd expect small air jumps were your car skips over the gravel or the bumps on the hills. Nope, on Big Rigs gravity is the real winner, sticking you to the floor the whole time.
Stellar Stone released a patch for this game, as if somehow trying to regain its dignity. Sadly they didn't, they fixed the AI problems and they now move but at extremely slow speeds, the finish text no longer reads 'your winner!' in bad english and was changed to 'you finish! '. This didn't really change much, the physics and braking were still as terrible as ever.
OK So being a 2003 game you don't expect much from the graphics department, and as expected the graphics aren't exactly great, but they are half decent for there time and shouldn't be completely disregarded as just another bad feature of the game. However there are alot of texture pop-in's and sometimes the textures don't even load at all on objects, and very rarely do they ever load on the cars.
Not much to say regarding music, to put it simple there is none. No music at all on this game, when I went through a painstaking 2 hours of playing just to review it and get some gameplay I had iTunes on in the background at all times, it can be rather humourous listening to 'Another Way To Die' Whilst randomly flying around my PC screen in my truck glitching out outside of the map until eventually getting stuck. So the simple solution to the music problem? iTunes. Apple does it again.
Replay Value? You can get a few good laughs with it now and then with a few friends, but overall as a game to play in your own time, you will pretty much never pick it up. Its not fun in any way and the constant, endless sctream of glitches and bugs will frustrate you to no end and you will end up ripping your hair out if it allready isn't.
Story - 0
Gameplay - 2
Graphics - 3
Music - 1
Replay Value - 0
OVERALL - 1.5