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Mad Tracks Review Microsoft Xbox360 XBLA

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  • Mad Tracks Review Microsoft Xbox360 XBLA

    Mad Tracks is an Xbox Live Arcade racer developed firmly with the pick-up-and-play style in mind. Players take control of toy cars and race them around miniaturised courses interspersed with a variety of party games. It’s not the first time this concept has been explored, with the superlative Toy Commander and still decent Toy Racer titles on Dreamcast proving that such a setting can provide a wealth of interesting and diverse locations. However, while these titles demonstrated a great deal of creativity and variety in their level selections the same can’t be said for Mad Tracks.
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    There are only actually three environments on offer – a toy store, a breakfast bar and a crazy-golf course – a fact made worse by the game’s shocking under-utilisation of these areas’ potentials. Take the single race-track set amidst the golf course, you might think it a prime opportunity for negotiating a series of classic obstacles such as windmills with rotating vanes and castle drawbridges. But no, it’s a boring Daytona-style oval set on an enclosed track with a complete lack of any creativity on show. The other level-sets provide a couple of race tracks each, but again they’re nothing to write home about. Most of the time you are actually racing on artificial track segments, much like Scalextric pieces, that have been laid out in order to link various parts of the map together, with very little actual time spent racing along the environments’ features. It does rather defeat the point of the toy car setup if you then don’t actually make use of it for the purposes of course design.
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    The racing itself is generic and nondescript, there’s almost no handling model to speak of, players graced with a tight turning circle regardless of their speed and there’s no real penalty for colliding with the track edges. This would be perfectly fine of course if the game backed it up with a decent set of power-ups or shortcuts (of which a couple have been shoehorned in awkwardly), but Mad Tracks’ implementation is also all over the place as far as these elements are concerned. There is the odd, nice little idea scattered in amongst the dross, one power-up blinds nearby players with a momentary flash of bright light, while another slows down time, effectively working like an inverse speed boost, slowing down the rest of the pack, but outside of these it’s a mess.
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    The core mechanic the game introduces is that each of the cars is powered by a spring, which decreases as you hold down the accelerator and increases when you let go of the trigger. As the gauge gets lower it reduces your acceleration and top speed and when it is completely drained you move at an extremely slow pace. In reality it just means you pull off the power when turning, which isn’t really a problem as it doesn’t actually slow you down to a noticeable degree, and as such ultimately doesn’t factor into players’ driving technique. That is until someone gets the EMP power up which completely drains your spring gauge in one go. Unless you have a Battery power-up handy, which refills it, (and given that the power-ups are randomised at pickup time, this isn’t something you can control) you might as well quit right there because this single event ruins any chance of securing a top place finish.
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    Things do get better when you leave behind the lacklustre racing and start playing some of the mini-games on offer. There are still a good number of mediocre offerings here that are nothing more than filler content, such as competing to see who can push the most objects off the edge of a small, square table which does not make for a thrilling competitive experience, but there are also a few gems scattered about. One, Par 5, sees players trying to move a ball down a simple course to the green at the end and be the first to putt it into the hole. Of course when you have your friends also attempting to knock your ball into the rough, thereby sending you back to the start, it suddenly becomes a surprisingly difficult task. Then there’s pool and table football which can be played in teams of two and are a great way to idle away the odd half hour or so. Room For Dessert gives each player three lives, one of which is lost each time they get knocked off the kitchen table, and works well as a last man standing battle mode. The power-ups become far more balanced at this stage, with the Ice Freeze gun – that can turn players temporarily into out of control, sliding ice cubes – married nicely with power-up placement that focuses on the edge of the playfield, turning rearmament into a risky but all too necessary endeavour. All of these games can be played in four-player split-screen, which can be an absolute blast.
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    It’s just that for each of the decent modes on offer there’s at least one lacklustre companion on show, such as Gone With The Wind, which sees you launching your car off a ramp to score as close to the centre of a target as possible. This has such a limited setup that everyone will have mastered it after their first go, wearing out its welcome almost immediately. Then there’s Beastie Balls that tasks players with dodging coloured balls that are bouncing all round a circular bowl structure. A novel idea but completely ruined by the appalling lack of any shading on the balls, making ascertaining their specific locations very difficult.

    The graphics themselves are woeful for the most part, with poor design complemented by the complete under-utilisation of the settings’ artistic possibilities. Many of the textures are low res and downright ugly, with swathes of blocky scenery laid out haphazardly. The artificial-track segments have at least had some time lavished on them with transparent sections and decent levels of detailing. The HUD meanwhile could have used some more work, as players gather power-ups they are added to an ever-growing queue in the bottom left corner, with the X button used to switch between them. These symbols are small and fiddly and can prove awkward to scan through once you have five or six items collected and are in the middle of a heated race.

    It’s a shame the designers wasted so much time designing the race tracks when the mechanics are so poor for this type of gameplay and clearly much more suited to the various party games on offer. As fun as Room For Dessert may be, the mode is only available on one map, and the same goes for the other offerings such as Par 5 which would have benefited greatly from a range of different layouts to help keep things fresh. As it stands there’s almost nothing to offer the lone gamer here; Mad Tracks can provide an evening or two’s enjoyment when your buddies are round, but it’s a very uneven package. It really is a shame to see the waste of such a promising idea.
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