Neat Idea, Harsh Execution
When I first saw a few screenshots of SARPRC, it reminded me of an older game named Revolt, where players controlled remote controlled cars. It also reminded me of what I would consider the best in the mini-car arcade driving games, Gripshift. Gripshift came out on the PSP years ago, and it’s been on the PSN almost from the get-go, and in a nutshell I recommend it over SARPRC, but let me explain.
SARPRC has a lot of content in numbers: one hundred mini-game challenges, sixty-five ‘campaign’ style challenges, online and local play, as well as unlockable vehicles. Vehicle differences are mainly cosmetic, as there are no provided stat meters to differentiate them, but you can expect your typical variety of larger tougher vehicles and smaller quicker ones.
I recommend doing the three short (fifteen minutes total), but informative and useful tutorials that are included. Here you will learn not only the point of the game (basically playing soccer with a large metallic ball), but also how to do various tricks, boosts, power slides, and jumps. The controls aren’t bad, and I was pretty comfortable with them about forty-five minutes into playing, but it’s the chaos that ensues that makes this quite a challenging game.
I decided to try out the first challenge, which was a 2 v 2 challenge against the CPU. I controlled my car on the blue team, had a CPU bot to help, and then the red team had two bots. The arena was the same as in the tutorial, a large oval shaped warehouse of a room, kind of like a hockey rink, that had a glass ceiling and curved walls; with enough speed you can cruise across the top of the ceiling upside down, it’s pretty fun. At each end of this room were two cut outs in the walls, the goals. The idea was to ram into this metallic ball and push it into the opponents goal, whoever scores the most in three minutes wins.
The concept is simple and interesting enough, but boy is it hard. Even on this first of sixty-five challenges, winning was a sincere challenge that took several efforts. Winning felt great, but at the same time I didn’t have any more confidence in my ‘skill;’ in other words, the win seemed almost by luck, or randomness. As I continued to play and struggle and think about what was really going on in the game, it honestly seems to me that this is more of a game of chance and luck than true skill. To score anyway besides accidentally or with a straight on collision is a very tall order indeed, because judging where the ball is going to go, assuming you’re able to hit it before another player hits it away from you, is a significant challenge.
The random nature of play in SARPRC can be frustrating and bad in that respect, but it can also be fun, although the former results tend to overshadow these times. Still, for those times you execute a forward flip and get to the ball just before the opponent or maybe even do a barrel roll to help defend your goal and it works, are definitely cool.
After spending some time in these challenges, I started on the mini-games. These mini-games are challenging, and generally involve you trying to race against the clock. The better you do, the better your star rating, which varies from 1 to 5. Beating mini-games unlocks more vehicles and Trophies, but these mini-games aren’t for slouches. They are indeed tough, but thanks to short load times and nice controls, playing these mini-games can be addictive for a while.
Besides up to four player multiplayer action, you can take the experience online, although I haven’t found many players just yet. The game hasn’t been available for long, so this might change, but right now you may be hard pressed to find many players online. You have the option of creating a game, or joining ranked and unranked matches, and the game will try to find matches for you, but if it fails it will suggest available games to you (although this is an option you can disable). You can also form Teams in the multiplayer interface with friends to take on others on the PSN. My experience online was similar to what I get in playing the single player game, although there were some bouts with lag and latency that didn’t make an already chaotic and tough game any easier.
As far as presentation goes, SARPRC features some nice clean menus and a sufficient upbeat instrumental soundtrack. Graphically, there are some good effects, but given the type of game that it is, it’s nothing really to write home about; it’s not outstanding, and it certainly isn’t bad, either.
And with that, let’s get to the wrap up…