Blur uses a well-known formula and applies an authentic make-up resulting in a well rounded fun racer.
So I got a copy of Blur at amazon for a reasonable price and started gaming. It's a mixture of Mario Kart and authentic cars that works surprisingly well. It's quite interesting that no game developers had such an idea before because the whole arcade fun racer with powerups uses mechanics that have been around for quite a while, not only in Mario Kart. I'm thinking of Diddy Kong Racing, Crash Team Racing and Speed Punks as well. Admittedly, those games are rather old, right? But Blur manages to approach this genre in a whole new and exciting way and makes it also easy to get into it.
Blur is fairly simple as you drive a car and try to win the race by utilizing powerups on the way. The control scheme is very accessible and beginner friendly which gives players who are completely new to such games the opportunity to get into the game really fast and learn the gameplay mechanics within their first race. Blur is perfectly made for friends who just want to play a game after the plug n' play principle, just pick a controller and start, it's that easy.
Speaking of playing with friends there is also a singleplayer mode or career mode which is good intentioned but poorly executed. There's no overarching storyline that keeps you hooked, it's more like achieving the specific goals you need to, to unlock the next races. To that the unlocking new cars mechanics are bland and ain't polished. So after unlocking a new car, which can be difficult at times as some goals are hard to achieve, you often get a free car as a gift besides the one you unlocked. It often happens to be the case that the car you got as a gift is even better, which makes unlocking cars uninteresting and feel unnecessary. What's the purpose for unlocking them if you get a better reward after that?
Anyways, Blur compensates that questionable design with a plethora of racetracks and different cars. While there are many vehicles that are subdivided into certain categories due to their stats, you can drive those on all tracks. However, there can be problems when you try to drive some of the fast wheels on tracks that have narrow roads and curves because it can be frustrating to drive through those without crashing into walls. It just makes the game look not very sophisticated when the race heavily tends to be a crashtest more than a fun race how it is supposed to be. This design decision was very obvious at one racetrack where me and my friends just couldn't get through specific curves and thus got owned by the game. Oddly, the AI had no problems whatsoever with this one racetrack.
The AI walks a fine line between quite clever and ridiculously incompetent, it depends on the track. While there is one "sprint"-race (like the ones you may remember from NfS: Underground), where you'll have a huge advance after a short time, the AI utilizes the powerups fairly clever. They'll keep items until they need them(mostly defensive ones) and use the offensive powerups right away most of the time. To that the powerups are surprisingly balanced which makes the game seem fair as no one has a big advantage over another driver and whatnot.
As I mentioned that the cars are categorized, the parameters that show the different stats of the cars don't seem to be relevant. Some vehicles appear to be faster than the stats obviously reveal, thus making it trivial whether you choose one car over another. But that's only within a category! Adding a little more depth to driving those wheels, some are inclined to drift while others don't which makes it easier for players to adjust to their certain driving styles.
I had the most fun playing Blur in multiplayer as the singleplayer didn't appeal to me that much thanks to the questionable unlocking mechanisms. Blur is accessible and delivers an intuitive control scheme which makes it easy to play it with friends who even don't know anything about games. The uniquely build mixture of well-known gameplay elements works well and the powerups are fairly balanced. The multplayer keeps you coming back for more though playing it excessively in singleplayer mode may lead into tedium for the formula real quick.