Novadrome certainly means well. This addition to the Xbox Live Arcade library is a 3D car combat game in which you speed around futuristic arenas in one of a variety of laser-spewing vehicles, crashing into and blowing up your rivals while grabbing different power-ups and trying to stay alive. Even the premise is pretty cool, as thin as it is: Evil robots have taken over Earth and forced us into this profoundly sinister competition if we want to live. Throw in a variety of game modes and online multiplayer support for up to eight players and you have what seems like a winning recipe for a fun little pick-up-and-play driving-and-shooting game. Unfortunately, Novadrome doesn't deliver on its promising concept, between its flatly generic presentation and its limp action.
The story of Novadrome is revealed through a few screens' worth of text, so this is a game that wastes no time putting you straight into the meat of the gameplay. Too bad what's there isn't more satisfying. When you begin a career game, you'll be plopped right into the first of many arenas and will probably need a few minutes to figure out the controls. Your car can't do much besides accelerate, go in reverse, and shoot. You'll also quickly observe that your car has a hollow, flimsy feel to it and seems more like it's a remote-controlled roller skate than the heavily armored death machine it's supposed to be. There are a few decent visual effects. For instance, you'll see armor pieces shred away from damaged vehicles, which explode into little parts when they finally run out of health. But Novadrome fails on one of the fundamental tasks of any car combat game, which is to give you vehicles and weapons that look and feel powerful.
Your car's stock weapon is a piddly laser blaster that automatically homes in on any target in front of you, gradually sapping its health. There's no skill involved in targeting, so the strategy devolves into trying to get behind a foe or ram him from the side so that you can keep shooting while he can't return fire. Of course, that's assuming your goal is to blow up the other racers, and in some of the game's modes of play, that's not the point. Novadrome features a half-dozen modes, including a basic deathmatch-style arena mode, a checkpoint race, a last-man-standing-style mode, and more.
One of the more prevalent but more annoying modes has you chasing after beacons that randomly appear throughout the arena. As soon as one racer passes through a beacon, it disappears and reappears someplace else, so everyone naturally scrambles to the next point. The goal is to pass through as many beacons as you can, but an alternate way to score is to gun down rivals who've passed through a bunch of beacons themselves. Consequently, only the last few minutes of such a match wind up being important. You can be in first place for most of the match, only to get blown up in the last few seconds, drop several ranks, lose, and have to start over. Having to depend so heavily on chance makes these events frustrating, especially since the solo campaign throws a lot of them at you early on, and you can't proceed unless you place first.
There are different cars and arenas to discover in Novadrome, but the game's exceedingly bland personality makes none of this exciting. Cars are rated different in a few attributes, and some are inherently better than others. However, these are just the starting stats, and you can find power-ups that boost your abilities in the arena, which means none of the cars are really that different. The tracks are all littered with power-ups, some ramps, and things like land mines and boosters that send you flying. It all seems very standard. As you play, you'll hear the same rock guitar riffs over and over, which sound good for a little while and then become very repetitive in a hurry. The rest of the audio is just boring. Contributing to the flimsy feel of the vehicles, the types of gut-wrenching metal-on-metal, throaty engines, and screeching tire sound effects you'd expect from a game like this just aren't there. Matches are punctuated mostly by the weak sound of those laser guns.
The multiplayer component of Novadrome is basically the same as the single-player game, except you're battling online against people instead of offline against computer-controlled drivers (there's no offline multiplayer). The inherent problems of the game apply to the multiplayer, though it's naturally somewhat more fun blowing up human players' cars than slogging it out against the AI. Multiplayer also suffers from somewhat of a cumbersome match-making system, which tosses you into lobbies for races already in progress, even when you're just looking for a quick match. Ranked matches force you to choose which mode of play you're looking to compete in, which seems to fragment the player population. It would have been nice if you could just jump right into any available game, but instead, you'll wind up wasting time waiting for other players to join the match and get ready.
What might be the final nail in the coffin is how stingy Novadrome is with its dozen unlockable achievements, most of which seem extremely difficult to earn. For example, one of them requires you to pass through seven of those randomly teleporting beacons in a row when playing against the computer, which seems about as likely to happen as winning the lottery. Strangely enough, not one of the achievements ties into the multiplayer component of the game. Most of them are based on inordinately tough single-player accomplishments, so you might wind up playing Novadrome for hours without earning a single one of these. Considering the asking price of 800 Microsoft points ($10), you might be better off not playing the game at all.
