Leadfoot Preview

Much like Papyrus is seen as the leader in NASCAR racing games, the development team at Ratbag is generally regarded as the leader in dirt-track racing games. Ratbag's second game, Dirt Track Racing, was generally well received by dedicated racing fans because of Ratbag's focus on realistic driving mechanics. But there were problems with the game, including tracks that were much less entertaining than those found in Ratbag's first driving game, Powerslide. After listening to complaints about Dirt Track Racing, Ratbag went back and designed a follow-up game named Dirt Track Racing: Sprint Cars that not only fixed most of the problems in the original Dirt Track Racing but added a number of new features like more tracks and sprint cars. Leadfoot is the latest inRatbag's series of racing games, but it takes a slightly different approach than the two previous games by introducing you to the world of off-road stadium racing in which massive jumps, powerslides, and split-second decisions play a crucial role in your performance during a race. Though the latest build of Leadfoot lacks many of the features that are planned for the final release, it already looks as though Leadfoot may be Ratbag's best effort to date.

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At the start of the game, Leadfoot lets you select one of three settings--novice, amateur, and professional. If you don't know much about dirt-track racing or you're more familiar with arcade-style driving games, you should probably start out with the novice setting because it features control that's much more arcadelike. The amateur setting is specifically for drivers who know about dirt-track racing, but there are still a few settings to ease you into the experience and prepare you for the professional mode. This mode automatically sets all of the options so that you get the most realistic driving experience possible in Leadfoot, and needless to say, if you're not prepared for this mode, vehicle spinouts and mistimed powerslides quickly become a source of aggravation. Unfortunately, in the current build, after you select one of these three difficulty settings, the game doesn't prompt you with this choice again, but you can go through the options menu and change all of the settings accordingly.

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Once you select from one of the three settings, you can move into Leadfoot's multiplayer mode or its single-player mode. The multiplayer mode is incredibly simple to use, so starting a multiplayer race shouldn't take more than a few seconds, but there's still the issue of actually being able to find other people to play against. This problem continues to plague just about every driving game that offers some form of multiplayer mode without a built-in matching service, but thankfully, third-party matching services like GameSpy register Leadfoot servers, making it even easier to quickly join and play a multiplayer game, which supports up to 10 drivers. Once you're in a multiplayer game, you can select from most of the options available in single-player, such as which track you want to race on and which type of vehicle you want to use during the race.