Smash ‘N’ Survive Review
Publisher: Version2 Games
Format: PSN
Release Date: Out Now
You know when you meet people in life and there’s always one that, for a reason you can’t quite nail, you know you don’t like them? That’s Smash ‘N’ Survive. Within 5 minutes of playing it, it was annoying me, and it took me ages to identify exactly why. Perhaps we’ve been spoilt for choice with the car battle genre. Between the standard setting Destruction Derby (which is a staggering 17 years old!) to the more recent Burnout series, the car battle genre has had some great games with more ventures in that direction actually being quite good. Smash ‘N’ Survive simply isn’t up to scratch with the rest of these.
I do have to say for a PSN game, it is quite impressive graphically, at least you think so until you realise that they have employed some rather lazy tricks to get away with rendering as little as possible. Tracks are set up in a way that there is never a huge amount of backdrop to render and objects you collide with on the tracks simple get a black texture painted over them and a token explosion takes place. One would assume that if my large, armour-plated car hit a small piece of machinery that the thing would actually move. Then I wonder if it’s the cynic in me thinking that maybe I’ve been spoilt by multimillion dollar projects with fantastically interactive environments but as I continued my play through I would find more examples that scream out “laziness” rather than “lack of resources”.
The key element of any of these games has been the driving gameplay, realistic enough to immerse the gamer, with enough of an arcade feel to it that it doesn’t require a massive cognitive effort to move the car. And, as above, most games seem to strike this balance quite well. Smash ‘N’ Survive gives us cars that feel like tanks, and tanks that feel like what I imagine trying to drive a three story building is like. It’s unresponsive, lagging and really just not a lot of fun. And as a result, the missions you are given to complete feel more like a chore rather than a game. Even the menus are slow to respond, with some taking about 4 or 5 seconds to actually update.
I thought I was going to be able to give the audio a good review because I quite enjoyed the heavy metal intro track as I was going through the menu for the first time. Until I realised it was a repeat of the same 20 seconds EVERY time you go into the menu. The dull monotonous tone really starts to grate on the ears after the first few times you go to the menu and gets to the point where you’ll mute the TV once you know you’re going back to the menu.
The thing is, the game does what it says, it’s a driving game, check, where you complete missions, check, and even has a bunch of stuff you can unlock. But the thought of playing through the game enough times to unlock the beast of machines at the end is actually something that makes me shudder. There are plenty of games out there that do the driving thing better than this, buy any of them.
Overall: 2/10
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