POWERDRIVE REVIEW - February 1995
| You must admit, it's a bit depressing.
There you were, right at the frontline of the next generation, forking out a fortune
buying one of the tiny trickle of Jaguars that actually managed to make it onto
shop/importers shelves back in 1994 when everyone was terrifically excited about them
(yes, everyone was once terrifically excited about the Jaguar). You admired the
potential contained in Cybermorph, you flipped over T2K, you looked forward to Doom and
AvP. You had 64 bits at your fingertips - hey, that's FOUR TIMES as many as everyone
else! Ha! - and you couldn't wait to see what sense-defying thrills were in store. Ripple dissolve to 1996. Despite being comprehensively beaten onto the High Street by several months, the Saturn and Playstation have become all-powerful. Every game seems to break astonishing new technical ground. All your next-generation mates have just spent their Christmas bonuses on a rally driving game so fast, challenging and exciting that the video gamer of just two years ago would have laughed a flat, hollow laugh right in your face if you'd shown him the pictures and said that this would be running on an affordable home system inside 24 months. Meanwhile, your sad 16-bit chums are playing a different rally driving game, a sluggish, old-fashioned, overhead-view effort that actually looks about two years older than it really is. "And what about yourself?", they ask, the disappointment still reflecting off their downtrodden faces. "Got any good rally driving games for your Jag?" "Hey, look, it's the Goodyear blimp!", you half-heartedly cry, pointing limply out of the window at a bleak and empty sky. Powerdrive Rally, then. It looks lovely, it really does. Gritty dirt and asphalt tracks, leafy country hedgerows and old red telephone boxes. Maybe all isn't lost. But then you drive across a bridge, noting that where you'd normally expect to find a fast-rushing stream or a serene village pond, there in fact seems to be a blue sky strewn with cumulo-nimbus clouds, creating the unnerving sensation that you've actually died and gone to some kind of rally-driving heaven. That illusion dissipates quickly, though, as you begin to play a slow-moving, stop-start game involving nothing more exciting than a few laps of a series of featureless courses against single, or even no, opponents. Even though it's a rally, deviating from the road (to cut a corner over a grassy verge, say) results in you coming to a crunching dead stop, sustaining expensive damage to your seemingly grass-damaged car. Corners arrive with such little warning that you can actually play the game almost as effectively solely by listening to your co-driver's necessitated shouts of "Hairpin left" and so on, without being required to look at the screen at all. There's a kind of honeymoon period in Powerdrive Rally where you lose on each new track every time you reach one, but having learned its layout you get one track further next game. The addictive qualities so found last but briefly, though, as you realise quickly that there's very little interesting or attractive to be found in the later courses that makes it worth the considerable effort expended to reach them, and go round your mate's house for another game of Sega Rally. |
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| By Time Warner HIGHS It's pretty It's quite difficult
LOWS It's slow It's shallow It's dull
Oh look, it's not bad, but... anyone want to buy a Jag? I'm saving up. 57% |
