Hands-on | Split/Second

Format: Xbox360/PS3/PC | Genre: Arcade racing | Publisher: Disney | Developer: Black Rock Studios | ETA: Q1 2010

By Lewis Denby

In Split/Second, you don’t brake.

As if you’d ever need to.  Smashing head-on into a wall at a hundred miles per hour simply flashes up a ‘You’ve crashed’ screen before depositing you back where you should be on the track, still hurtling along at top speed.  And besides, doing so would only dampen the ferocious atmosphere that emerges from driving full-pelt around a track while the world happily explodes all around you.

In many ways, Split/Second is your typical arcade racer.  You’ve never to worry about vehicle damage, and you can easily plough your way through a race barely touching anything anything but the accelerator.  But in another way, it’s set apart by its focus on alarming levels of staged destruction.

You’re a driver in a reality TV show, the tracks on which you’ll race having been rigged with explosives.  Drive well enough, and you’ll earn the chance to detonate these explosives at just the right time to bring an entire building crashing down on top of the car in front of you.  Or a large, open area crumbling beneath your wheels, allowing you to access a shortcut through tunnels below.  Or a shopping mall blowing up while you’re inside it.  Or a jumbo jet falling from the sky, in extraordinary flames, as you flail around an airport runway.

Split/Second is ridiculous.  And, judging from our short time with the game, it’s shaping up to be a whole lot of fun.

//New season
In development at Black Rock Studios and set for publication by, somewhat amusingly, Disney, Split/Second is an exciting prospect.  Set across a fictional television season, its story is strewn across 24 episodes, each comprising three separate race events.  Since the version we played at last week’s Eurogamer Expo only featured a single race, and even that entertained us again and again across the two days, things sound promising for the full release.

It certainly won’t have any trouble keeping up the momentum.  Cars roar around the tracks at unfathomable speeds, the background’s once-crisp lines blurring as the speedometer reaches its highest figures.  By the end of the race, the level of destruction is… well, it’s absolute chaos.  Buildings have exploded, bridges have collapsed, planes have crashed and cars have flown through the air, propelled by the most fabulous of collisions.  Its pacing is marvellous.  Each lap ramps up the madness ever more.

Where it might struggle, however, is in keeping things interesting over repeat plays.  We played the build’s single event a good few times each, and few of us reported any significant differences on each occasion.  Perhaps things exploded in a slightly different order, or were triggered at a different time.  Maybe one person was in the mall when it collapsed, while another had shot out the other side to safety.  But that seems to be around the level of variety on offer – and that could hinder its lasting value somewhat.

Of course, it seems silly to complain when you sit Split/Second alongside linear, set-piece driven action games – which, curiously, is almost what the title seems to have most in common with.  None of these games offer much variety when it comes to a single sequence.  And with the impressive promised length of the story mode, it’s likely Split/Second’s lasting appeal will lie more with the variety of events on offer than it will with different approaches to each one.

//Not a scratch
Still a fair way away from Release, Split/Second already feels mightily polished.  There’s a gorgeous, vivid contrast to the art style, and the vehicles handle well.  The only downside is a lack of damage feedback – there’s little in the way of visual representation when you crash; very few bumps and scrapes and wheels-falling-off as a memoir of your crazed destruction.  There’s just a message telling you you’ve wrecked your car, then – miraculously – the race continues.

Actually writing off your car half-way through an event would feel cruel and pointless in Split/Second, but it’s still a slightly awkward transition between crashing and being deposited back in the race.  It’s the sort of thing that, if tidied up, could really brush Split/Second with that enormous, high-quality sheen that it already deserves.

And if it can manage that… well, then come Q1 next year, it can hit me with all the ridiculous explosions it likes.