Ever seen the movie “Death Race”? Well it’s a remake of another movie which is based on a book and the general premise is that the prison system is so overun that the prisoners are put into gladiator style races to the death. Split/Second is kind of like that, minus the downside of being in prison, and add the bonus of getting large amounts of money and seeing crazy explosions.

Split/Second: Velocity is a racing title from developer Black Rock Studio whom you might know about if you bought “Pure” another racing title. The game is set on a fictional reality TV show in which the participants race for money, glory and all the women that would surely accompany flying around roads in absurdly fast cars with large structures exploding everywhere!

While racing around the circuits, well you couldn’t really call them that. While racing, you fill up a power play meter which I would like to that seen in titles like Burnout but it’s not the “boost bag” we’re all used too. By filling up this meter you’re able to greatly alter the racetrack and as a result, your chances of making amazing comeback victories. The AI will also trigger these abilities making for some frantic game play.

In order to fill the meter you have to perform death defying moves such as drafting extremely close to other vehicles, going off jumps and doing the good old cliché drift around a corner. It’s all stuff we’ve seen before but definitely worth the reward. These triggers are various and come in numerous forms. It’s not the triggers that are innovative though, it’s the way you activate them with your meter. Instead of going for the general copy/paste mode of “Fill meter up, get reward” Split/Second takes a more Street Fighter IV approach of allowing you to fill it up and harvest a huge reward, or use tiny portions and gain smaller amounts.

The severity of these events and the destruction caused by them is dependent on how full the meter is. The first, and most mediocre events can be triggered when the bar is a third of the way full whilst the most devastating rewards of death are only usable when you’ve banked your meter to full. When you’re going at breakneck speeds around the track, various objects are highlighted a blue colour for your basic power plays, a red highlight for your middle level power plays and a from what I remember the third level had no colour. These events need to be timed perfectly to slow down and decimate your opponents as much as possible.

The system is very similar to the one implanted into the Xbox title; “Need for Speed: Most Wanted” where you were able to destroy pursuing police cruisers by driving through appropriately marked environmental set pieces and revel in the destruction and burnt corpses littering your path of domination and destruction. The results vary from simple things like explosions to outright ludicrous events that incorporate a huge plane skimming the road and taking out your opponents left, right and centre. My personal favourite is making a boat slide of its holdings in a dry dock.

Something that kind of peeved me about Split/Second was the car interaction with the environments. When a car hits a solid object at an insane speed, or even 120 kilometres per hour, it won’t just bounce off with increased speed and drive off. Of course, instant wrecks in an arcade racer like this would be counterproductive, but there needs to be some sort of advanced physics here. It’s also the same with drifting, there was nearly no skill or control required to just floor it around the corner, brake then accelerate when I was done. Snaking (Google it) was nearly possible on most straights.

The graphical presentation of Split/Second: Velocity is pretty much comparable to the sheer beauty of The Mona Lisa. The destruction is stylised and beautiful giving your eyes something to always be feasting upon. It’s interesting to note, that as game and graphics technology alike has grown the explosions seem to be getting more and more amazing. Just Cause 2 featured some of the best I have seen but Split/Second is really close to taking that crown. However with this title it seems positives always come with negatives.

There’s only really two versions of cars in this game; brand new out of the box and the complete opposite: completely destroyed and useless. This proves a problem, as your cars visual damage is the only representation you really have of how close you are to burning out and blowing up. I don’t know if that’s due to the engine, or just laziness on the behalf of the developer.

This extends to the cars in general. There’s really only two types. Sleek, beautiful and fast, then it’s counterpart in the form of slow, ugly square looking cars. They (Black Rock) should have taken a leaf from the book of Burnout in that sense that there was so much variety in the vehicles you could use. It added an extra element of fun and kept you coming back to the game time after time.

Sound wise the game is pretty much what you’d expect from a modern Triple A title. Nothing really stood out to me, and I can’t recall anything worth making an extra mention of. It was nice however to have the cars have individual sounding engines that didn’t automatically rev out after the first few seconds of a depressed trigger or accelerator.

The achievements for the game are pretty bland and average. Nearly all of them just revolve around basic game play elements i.e.; triggering power plays and winning races. It would’ve been nice to see a more fleshed out list for this title on Xbox 360, but it’s easy to overlook it.

In terms of replayability and bang for your buck, Split/Second: Velocity does deliver. There’s all up 72 “Events” or levels based around the premise of this game being a reality TV show so the content is delivered into episodes. There’s numerous game modes, my favourite being “Survival” where you race along the sprint track, and various trucks drop barrels in your path trying to stop you reaching your goal. The game is an easy pick up and play title with friends in its offline 2-player split-screen mode and you’re able to play with your online friends in 8-player online.

All in all Split/Second: Velocity is a fun game. It relies too heavily on it’s one concept; explosions and racing. A more fleshed out title would’ve been great. The game seems to deliver a lot of excitement at first, but then wears its own gearbox down as it expands all its ideas within the first few hours. If you had great memories of blue shells decimating you in Mario Kart, wait until someone drops a building on you.

Pros

• Fresh new game idea
• Some crazy set pieces
• Fun gameplay with friends

Cons

• Relies too much on it’s one premise, not multiple
• Stupid car physics/handling
• Not enough vehicles

Xin Gaming Score: 7.8/10

Note: This was reviewed primarily as an Xbox 360 title. PC Users, I played this with a AMD Athlon x4, 4GB DDR2, ASUS M2A74-AM-SE and a HIS 5750 and I found with all settings maxed out the game actually didn’t work properly. I don’t mean the hardware couldn’t cope, it easily did, it just seemed like the game didn’t want to work.