Hi-Octane

"What, no landmines?"

After playing WIPEOUT for a while, I started looking for another Saturn game similar to that. Not just a simple racing, but where I can attack and do damage to opponents a la MARIO CART. I saw a preview of CYBER SPEEDWAY, but wasn't too please with it. Then I checked HI-OCTANE and the two available reviews online, saying positive things about it. When I got the game and played it, I had mixed feelings about it.

There's actually no story behind this in the game or on the manual. It doesn't tell when and where this takes place, whose racing and why. No FMV intro or anything when you start the game up. There is a demo play with the credits included, though. You just get to choose one of the 6 vehicles in one of eight teams. Then compete in six racing options. Single Race, where you choose one of nine tracks to race in. Championship , which you race through all nine tracks. Clone race, in which you race against yourself in a time trail. Split Screen Single Race, where you race against a second player. Hot Seat, where up to 8 players use one controller to race in a not potato manner. Finally, Death match, where you win not by crossing the finish line, but by wiping out all your opponents in a shoot-out attack.

The graphics are not that good, but it gets the job done. It's clear and sharp, but a bit grainy and rough in certain areas. There are pop-ups, but they are masked by using a fading fog-like effect. There is slowdown as well, especially if there are more than 3 vehicles on the screen. When you use the booster, you can't tell if you are really speeding up. The hovercrafts themselves are not that creative looking. Just a bunch of squares, triangles and rectangles, big and small put together.

There's not much in the sound effects department. Just the booster sound, the bumping when you hit something, the missile explosion, which sounds weak, and the machine gun fire, which doesn't sound authentic. As for music, there are only 3 themes and each are around 10 minutes long. Although repetitive, they sound good and fit the mood.

The controls are a bit sluggish, especially when there is slowdown. Sometimes it's a bit hard to really speed up to make certain jumps, but that probably part of the challenge. The target aiming is automatic and easy to track onto the opponents' crafts. You can select which vehicles in front of you to hit and when the target turns red, you can home in missiles on them as well.

When I played the game, I like the fact that I could really attack other hovercrafts and destroy them. Not permanent, though because the repair ships fly in, fix them and they are back in the race. Only in Death Match where you can wipe them out for good, although you can select how many lives to have before the game. I was impressed with the creatively in this game, such as the fog pop-up effect and the Hot Seat racing option. Up to 8 people can play. The first person starts racing then seconds later gives it to the second player, who races in a similar but different craft and so on. It's like two player racing except there's no split screen, which shortens the view, you use one controller and it switches from one vehicle to another. Some might be turned off by this because while their racing craft goes auto, it might pass by the pit stops to grab fuel, ammo and shields or miss picking up power-ups among the road.

The gripes I have is that it doesn't have land mines you can throw into the road, which is just as well, since the crafts hover in the air. You can't ram them off the road because the crafts go RIGHT THROUGH each other. You also need a memory cart in order to save because the memory RAM is more than 150, up to 400. To make matters worse, there are a few glitches I found. One of them is when I'm in the options screen the background turns white. When that happens and load into the race game, the screen goes black and freezes. I had to delete the configure memory and redo the thing again in order to correct it. Another glitch is at times if I get off track, I hit an invisible wall trying to get back in. I don't know if it's caused by the disc or is there something wrong with my Saturn system.

This is a decent game. Not a great game, but not bad either. It provides a challenge and hours of fun, but doesn't keep you amuse for long. Only the slowdown and glitches drag it down, which can be overlooked and possibly corrected. Rent it first, if you can, to see if you can tolerate the mistakes.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 08/28/03