PRLowy Blade Runner
We will travel to cities from the Berlin Wall to Moscow in the legendary cars of the communist era. We will visit Europe in an alternative colorful reality, full of colorful neon lights and billboards. The climate like from a Sci-Fi movie is combined with the classics of motorization and tourist monuments. In the cyberpunk landscape, we will notice the Palace of Culture in Warsaw or the Berlin TV Tower. As a citizen of Warsaw, however, I cannot help but point out to the creators that the stadium they have located in our city is deceptively similar to the Spodek Arena in Katowice. Visually, the game is very attractive, but there are some shortcomings. Although the creators boast about three-dimensional graphics, if we enter a crowd of people as a result of a bug, we will see that they are two-dimensional flat like cut out of cardboard. There are also trees like simple, angular nuggets like lollipops on sticks – a bit like from children’s drawings. Of course, while driving at dizzying speeds, no one will look so closely at the square image defects, but unfortunately the steering itself is just as crude.
“Small but crazy”!
Mastering driving is quite difficult. Most cars run as if they were rear-wheel drive and skid easily. At high speeds, gently move the steering wheel to make the car dance like on ice. He throws him like a mustang in American action movies. It easily gets off the ground and spins the barrels in the air with just a slight collision with a gang or another car.
As an explanation of the inconvenient driving, we receive information that these monuments do not have ABS or traction control. Despite professional explanations, driving is not very realistic, because the cars do not have a manual gearbox either. But thanks to the use of turbo-boosters available on the board, we can reach speeds of up to 220 km / h with a toddler!
Accelerations are quite original here. We enter a colored star so that our car changes its color, then we run into a lane of the same color on the road and we move much faster. The driven lane temporarily disappears and the next car cannot take full advantage of it right away. I associate the steering and acceleration mechanism with infantile races for younger players. And the whole idea of the game with a reference to the communist era would seem to be targeted rather at the nostalgia of older people.
You can choose the color
In Electro Ride we have a lot of variants available, both for solo and multiplayer games. I am sorry to say that my pads did not work as they should and I could not take full advantage of the benefits of the Split Screen (which, unfortunately, is rare in new racing games, so I personally hunt for such old school rarities!).
In solo mode, we can take a quick round in “Race with a ghost”, “Time Trial” or “The last one is gone”, or take a longer Career. In it, we will discover the capitals of the USSR countries and unlock cars characteristic of these regions. In modes other than Career, only cars modeled on Polish classics (Fiat 125p, Fiat 126p, Polonez, Syrena Sport, Żuk) are available. However, here we have a chance to expand our collection with Zastava, Skoda, Trabant or Wartburg. After “conquering” each country, we choose only one new car, which I consider a very good solution, because it can increase replayability.
Personally, I fell in love with a car inspired by the German Melkus RS 1000, which perfectly sticks to the road and is not afraid of any speed or curves!
“The three of us are working – we are building for 12!”
I admit that my adventure with Electro Rideit started with a big disappointment. I encountered a lot of bugs in it! Initially, the lower screen in the multiplayer mode crashed during the countdown to start, the music turned off for a very long time at completely random moments, I could drive off the board with the car and disappear into the depths of nothingness, the car could suddenly stand on the acceleration bars … I even found a combination of buttons on a pad that shoots the car upward about five meters. But, as I am not easily discouraged, I tried to run the game on three different computers and I also got an update, after which many problems disappeared (although I must admit that the off-road trips were quite interesting and I will miss them!). If I could add something to the game, it would definitely be a small map visible while driving,
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It is worth emphasizing here that Electro Ride is created by a young team under the leadership of Sylwester Osik without the support of any giants from the industry, and its very beginning was created as part of his BA thesis. Therefore, I encourage you to give this game a well-deserved chance! The project also had an unfortunate adventure with an untimely launch on Steam. Due to an oversight by the publisher, the game went on sale about two months before the planned premiere, unfortunately in a very underdeveloped form. Without pointing fingers – some Polish cyberpunk games come out earlier, others later. In races, false starts happen sometimes, and mistakes can happen to young and old alike.
And although “the big one can do more”, remember that everyone started somewhere!
We would like to thank Ultimate Games for the copy of the game for review.
