“BLAND!” “AVERAGE!” “UNINSPIRING!!!” These are three words that you’ll never see emblazoned upon the box of any game on any format on your local videogame store’s shelf. Unfortunately, they are (in this reviewer’s humblest of opinions) the three quickest ways of describing this take on the immensely over-populated racing game genre on Playstation 2.
Slip on your rose-tinted specs with me while we take a quick jaunt down Racing Game Memory Lane; don’t worry, it’s a short journey, but one which is needed just so we can re-acquaint ourselves with the reasons that we fell in love with the genre in the first place.
1. Remember when just finishing FIRST in a RACE was not only a GOOD thing, but the ONLY thing (much like racing in real life, for that matter – how coincidental)
2. Reminisce about the good old days when RACING really was the prime motivator in a RACING game? I can.
3. Dribble incoherently into your Battenberg cake as you vaguely remember that the driving experience in (decent) racing games was FUN.
Slip off your specs and realise that these three randomly remembered facts have gradually been replaced or “enhanced” with all sorts of bells and whistles in the intervening years; some “enhancements” like the Kudos system in PGRs 1 and 2 really have been a bonus, as they’ve always complimented exciting and entertaining racing. The collect-em-up nature of the Gran Turismo games has certainly added depth to a genre that we all thought (back in 1986) could never really be anything other than 2-inch-deep-puddle shallow. Now we come bang up to date with Enthusia: a game whose many “enhancements” do nothing of the kind. A game which, right from the initial loading screens makes you kinda go “uh”, and not really expect much from there on in. It’s so hard to explain how some games just don’t grab you from the outset. It’s just a gut feeling, and indeed some games do take a little while to grow on you, but this game just doesn’t seem to want to germinate in the Petrie dish of your imagination.
From the get-go you are presented with the very epitome of blandness in terms of the menus. So workmanlike, it’s almost as if an accountant who spends his entire day wading through Excel-hell has been commissioned to design them. You are offered the usual suspects, but with the intriguing options of “Enthusia Life” and “Driving Revolution”. We’ll get on to “Enthusia Life” mode in a bit, as that’s the main meat of the game, but a brief mention of the “Driving Revolution” mode is in order, particularly as it doesn’t represent any kind of “revolution”, and the “driving” is, for the most part, pretty boring. If you haven’t guessed already, “Driving Revolution” is a fancy name for Enthusia’s take on the licence tests found within many modern racing games. And, as with most of these tests in most of the games, it’s the kind of addition that really does only appeal to about 50% of the gaming populace, with the remaining 50% playing through them simply because they have to. Whilst Enthusia’s test mode isn’t anywhere near as essential as (say) GT4’s, it may still pay you to endure a fair bit, if only to get more au fait with the unique handling of the vehicles.
“Enthusia Life” is pretty much a standard Career mode with some truly spreadsheet-tastic bells and whistles attached. I really can’t go into any great detail about the ranking system, odds for each race, Enthu Points and various percentages and graphs and the suchlike that ensue after every race because I would not only run the risk of sending you into a coma, but also officially make myself a racing game anorak instantaneously. If you wanna know about all that, go and buy the game – I’m certainly not gonna stop you.
After all that pretty negative stuff so far it’s time to move onto (bizarrely) the actual driving and racing aspect of Enthusia.
IT’S FANTASTIC!!! AWESOME!! INCREDIBLE!!!………. Well no, it isn’t. I’m lying just to look big and clever, and I’ve failed on both counts… miserably. Much has been said about Enthusia’s fanatical approach to the various effects of centres of gravity, G-Forces and God knows what else on the handling of the cars, ultimately this all seems to have been for nought, as the cars all seem to handle in a strangely vague way once out on the circuit. Again, it’s a very hard to thing to pinpoint satisfactorily, but if handling in a racing game (be it arcade or sim-orientated) isn’t “right” the whole thing’s just not going to work for you. Maybe it’s the fact that, even with all the driving aids switched on, a powerful rear-wheel drive car will slip and slide to a frankly astonishing degree, and for frankly astonishingly long periods of time. Maybe it’s the fact that there seems to be no real feel of speed within the car that stymies the game so much, even with an uniquely odd (and completely ineffective) peripheral-vision-blurry-effect-thingummy implemented? Or maybe it’s simply down to that indescribable “feel” just not being right. Another annoyance is that you get “Enthu Points” deducted for sloppy driving, like hitting walls or opponents. Unfortunately, it doesn’t discriminate when it’s an AI car tapping into YOU, so off the points come. Irritating. The graphics are merely adequate, with the cars (yet again) just lacking that extra lustre that the likes of GT4, TOCA and PGR2 can muster up. Tracks are pretty soulless affairs, with the odd animated aeroplane and such dotted around in attempt to render them less sterile, but the constant and unwavering 60 frames per second framerate is most definitely a good thing… even if it isn’t used to full effect to generate a really decent feeling of speed.
As I mentioned right at the start: the racing game genre is possibly THE most over-populated and heavily fought genre on PS2 (and Xbox too for that matter), and Enthusia, for all its talk of VGS (Virtual Gravity System – a gauge in the centre of the screen that shows shifting g-forces, and pressures on tyres), and “Enthu Points” and rankings and flip knows what, just hasn’t got what it takes to start right up at the front of the grid with the likes of GT4 or PGR2. Even the much-maligned Sega GT 2002 is a more “fun” pastime.
It gets a 6 rather than a 5/10 simply due to the fact that it is very obvious that a great deal of time and effort has been put into researching the various effects that G-force and the suchlike have on the vehicles. It’s just a shame that none of that actually made for an enjoyable game.
Maybe the combination of an ever-increasing average age of videogamers, and their subsequent real life experiences with many different vehicles both on the road and on trackdays (as in mine, and other reviewer’s cases) has made this an even tougher genre to exploit, but one thing’s for sure: a racing game has to be pretty damn special to merit a decent score in 2005, and as hard as this game tries to be different (hey – it has "desert" racing and an optional clutch button!), releasing it after GT4 was tantamount to marketing suicide.
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