"Beating People With Nunchucks While Driving At Over 180Kph is Fun"

Road Rash III is a fine game for the Genesis and well worth your time. It is a racing game, but not your typical kind. In this game you can kick, punch, and use multiple weapons upon other racers to get ahead and qualify for your race. The game is also quite funny. When you are finished with a race a screen will appear with some words from someone. These screens are filled with ridicule, advice, comments from cops if they bust you, and the ever-elusive praise. The game may appear simple at first, but when you start getting past the first two levels you can really see how much depth there is to the game.

Game Play(9/10)

The game is about qualifying(making it into the top 3) a bike and through 5 Levels where each one has 5 tracks. Each consecutive level has improved enemy bikers. The enemy bikers become faster, become more aggressive, and you will begin to see more powerful weapons being wielded. These weapons can be stolen by pressing by punching them when they are attempting to strike you with the weapon. You can steal and hold in your inventory all the weapons you can steal and switch through them up by pressing Up + Start. Finding a good weapon to knock enemies off their bikes is essential if you do not have much in the way of a bike at some point. Using your kick to smash them into car and ramming your bike into enemies is also a good way to knock them off their bikes.

Another important element in Road Rash III is about getting the right bike for what level you are on. Years ago when I first played the game I saw that it was possible to buy the most expensive bike immediately even though you are at level 1. Of course I grinded the first level for hours until I could buy that Super bike to find that the other racers could not even compete with me. However I also noticed that the makers of the game put some levels in the early races that are NOT designed for you to have this super-fast bike. This made the game far harder for me than it should have. I pretty much constantly wrecked my bike and ended up frustrated with the game. Until I got to the Level 4 and 5 races where you need the speed an expensive bike provides, and all the levels are made for you to race at high speeds.

When I played the game again I did not want a repeat performance where the bike did not match the levels. So I started experimenting with the other bikes, and was really surprised. There are three classes of bikes. Rat bikes, Sport bikes, and Super bikes, and each class of bike has around 5 bikes(The Wild Thing's can be considered the sixth Super bike). I found that even though a bike may be more expensive, it is not necessarily better than a bike that is just a bit cheaper. Each bike has its own level of handling, and its important to find out which ones are fun to drive but are fast enough for you to qualify for your level. It makes the game a lot more fun when you can compete for placement with other drivers instead of just worrying about FINISHING the race in one piece! I now think it would have been better if the makers had level caps about when you could buy a class of bike. For instance, Levels 1 and 2 could only buy Rat Bikes, Level 3 could also buy Sport bikes, and Levels 4 and 5 could buy Super bikes.

You race against 14 other racers in increasingly long and difficult tracks. In Level 1 the tracks are short and easy. But the length of the tracks starts increasing and you will start to feel stressed around Level 4 and 5. Even if you upgrade your bike fully you will still wreck it if you are not careful. Crash two or three times into an oncoming car and you will retire from the race and you will have to pay for bike repairs. The game is not easy by the time you reach Level 5, but if you prioritize finishing the races you should do fine with a bike like the Banzai 750 1100.

Graphics(7/10)

As good as Road Rash III is, the graphics really are sub-par. The sprites are grainy and the colors of them are sometimes similar to other sprites. This makes distinguishing them when driving fast....rather difficult. This problem is really only very apparent on the desert levels in Kenya and Australia.

Besides the sprites being grainy, they also appear rather suddenly. This is due to hardware limitations I imagine, where the programmers could not show everything ahead even though you are at the top of a high hill. This is a very annoying problem and makes the game unrealistic. To compensate for your distance "blindness" you have to drive as though a sign, or a cow, or a rhino, or a building will suddenly appear around a corner, even if you could see a couple of seconds ago that there was nothing but road to be seen for at least a half-mile.

Sound and Music (9/10)

The sound for Road Rash III is fairly exciting and really fits each stage well. I cannot say I really like this type of music much, but I realize the music is good.

Overall(9/10)

Road Rash III is a fun racing game for the Genesis and should at least be tried if you are looking for a good game to play. While it suffers from problems with sprites appearing seemingly out of nowhere at times if you accept that reality than you will have fun with it. And you have to admit, it is really fun to run over pedestrians and beat other riders senseless with nun chucks :). 9 out of 10.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 07/21/09

Game Release: Road Rash 3 (US, 05/15/95)