What started as a fast paced, fun experience turned into an oxymoronic, infuriating one.
As soon as you fire up Wipeout you can see there's been a lot of effort put into it. For a lot of the games on the PSP, you may find yourself thinking "Well this is good, but could be done better on the PS2." Well this isn't the case here. The presentation makes it feel like it could've only been done, or at least done well on the PSP. Every last detail has been thought through and implemented brilliantly, and I'm just talking about the selection screens you get post-intro! There's a myriad of options to tailor the game whatever way you please, and they're done in such a way to make them feel necessary, not overcompensating. But seeing as the actual racing may take up a bit more time than flicking through options, I should probably talk about that for a while.
There are single and multiplayer modes, but you'll want to train for a bit on single player before you have a little 'friendly' competitive action with your fellow PSP owners. So you enter single player and you're met with 5 options - Single Race, Tournament, Time Trial, Zone and Free Play.
With Single Race you're given the chance to individually race any track you've unlocked in the game at any class.
Tournament, at first, gives you one set of 4 tracks to race on, one after another. If at the end of the fourth race you have the highest number of points you unlock another set, and so on. There's 4 tournaments at each class to be unlocked, 3 with 4 tracks and 1 with 8.
Time Trial gets you away from competitive racing against other ships, and puts you against the clock. This can be either the easiest or hardest mode depending on what ship you use, or how good you are at hitting every booster on the track!
In Zone mode you have 1 track in which you race a prototype ship repeatedly, at extreme speeds. There are no opponents but your ship will eventually be destroyed. If you manage to get a medal, you'll unlock the next track. There are 4 Zone tracks in total. Free Play is just your ship going round and round the track forever, a pretty pointless addition, but maybe useful if you want to try out a track you just unlocked before you go into a full fledged race.
There are 5 classes in Wipeout - Vector, Venom, Flash, Rapier and Phantom. As with the unlocking of tracks, only Vector is available to you from the get go. Get enough medals and you unlock the next class. Starting out, Vector may seem moderately fast, but when you finally reach Phantom it'll feel like you were going backwards in comparison! There's a nice selection of teams to race as (8, with 2 unlockable), each with their own pros and cons as regards speed, shield, handling etc.
Races can be fun and frantic, tournaments gruelling, time trials tricky and zones blindingly fast. But this game has some flaws, and pretty major ones at that.
One of my biggest complaints is the repetitive ways a race starts. There's a way for your ship to get an instant boost that will allow you to overtake all the other ships, but even if you're in the ship with the best thrust and the best speed, you will always get overtaken, even by slower ships. And it stays that way for the majority of the first lap. Enemy ships also border on invulnerable for the first 20 seconds or so of a race. You drop 5 mines into the path of a ship catching up on you, hear them explode when they collide into it, then look in shock as he still overtakes you within a few seconds, without using a shield or a booster. Whereas if you get hit by a mine near the start of a race, you don't just slow down, you stop. And you're playing catch-up for the rest of the race.
While most of the pickups are of some use, there are 2 that I loathe beyond belief; Autopilot and Disruption Bolt. Autopilot on paper sounds good; your ship goes past maximum speed and takes every corner flawlessly for 5 seconds. In action though, it's quite the double edged sword. It has a habit of disengaging right before corners, and seeing as it never makes any preparatory methods to take corners, it just takes them the second they arrive, so when it disengages, you're sent hurtling at full speed into a wall, and whatever lead you just built up is instantly gone. It also basically keeps you glued to the centre of the track, and sends you head first into whatever mines or bombs are there, that could easily be avoided otherwise.
Disruption Bolt - You use this on an enemy craft, nothing happens. They use one on you, your race ends. Well maybe not to such a degree. But there's nothing more infuriating than being first coming up to the last turn, then getting a Disruption Bolt out of nowhere that reverses your controls, putting you in 4th or 5th place. Well almost as infuriating is coming up to a ramp or a section of track you can fall off, and getting hit by a missile or whatever else, and you slowly. teeter. off. Then get put back on 5 seconds before the guy that was in last place.
Another annoying trait is that, much like in a real F1 tournament, the winners are all predetermined before the race even begins. Without fail the same guys always finish in the same position. I don't mean every tournament, I mean for every race in one tournament. For example, Triakis will always finish first for one, Piranha for another, even Feisar came second for a few! Now I know this may be somewhat necessary to stop the player from running away with the title, but it's annoying to know that you can't slip up once, because there's no coming back. It's also annoying if you actually think that no matter what amount of weapons or tactics you use, you have no effect on the final standings.
One more annoyance is how surprisingly punitory the game can be to you if you go to fast. I mean a game whose main selling point is speed, that doesn't let you go fast? Come on. But it's true, though really only noticeable in Rapier and Phantom. Go too fast over a ramp, you can crash into various visible and invisible barriers. Or even worse, going too fast around certain corners can put you on your side or upside down, and it takes the game about 10 seconds to register this and reposition you, so that effectively ends your race. And most of the tracks have so many corners that it's impossible to build up a decent speed anyway. Hence me using oxymoronic in the review summary.
If you have friends with PSPs, you should get this game. Multiplayer is a lot of fun and you can have some really great races with some of the flaws mentioned above a non factor due to no computer controlled ships. Modes include Single Race, Time Trial and Tournament.
Gameplay: 7 - If it weren't for the above flaws this would be a 9. They do detract that much from gameplay to warrant a 3 or 4 point deduction, which is a big shame. I say 3 or 4, because the fact that this game reminded me so much of Wipeout 2097 and the fun I've had playing multiplayer brings it back up 2 points.
Graphics: 9 - Cool, crisp, unique tracks and ships, big explosions and nice effects, and not one bit of slowdown. The excellent, customisable presentation of the game is also welcome. Certain things can look a bit jagged at times and there's one or two blemishes here and there, but otherwise extremely pleasing to the eye.
Sound: 8 - Very clear, no distortion, weapons hit and hit hard if you have this turned up. The tunes are great too, very functional but ultimately very forgettable.
Value: 8 - One very nice feature of the game is that with each gold medal you win you receive a new piece of concept art, and with 144 gold medals to get, this can keep you occupied for a long time. Added to this is the ability to download new tracks, ships and skins, all implemented brilliantly; none of them feel tacked on or like pointless updates. Multiplayer again adds to this.
Tilt: 6 - Abnormally low for a game I have played, and still play so much. But the flaws in this game unfortunately brought me to a level of frustration I've almost never experienced before. If the game wasn't such a good one outside of these, this would've been a 1, no question. So that should say how well the graphics, gameplay, sound, features and if you've played 2097, nostalgia, just all combine to make a great package. It's just such a shame that the annoying parts can become so magnified.
So in summary, this game is definitely worth buying. It's probably the best racing title on the PSP, and one of the system's better titles overall, even this long after launch. I wanted to give it 9+ but simply couldn't look past the infuriating flaws. However, if you're not as pedantic or easily frustrated as me, and odds are you're not, I'd give this game a 9.2.