Azaraki legutóbbi értékelései

Let me preface this review by saying that I've never played the other Test Drive games, so I'm not comparing it to those, this'll be a review from a pure racing game standpoint.

I was looking forward to this, and was promptly disappointed. First off, I read some of the other reviews and want to clarify something: People are talking about the CPU racers being too aggressive and purposely slamming into you, from my experience this is not entirely the case. You will get bumped a lot, but I'd say it's more about CPU's being stubborn than malicious. It feels like the other cars will pick the way they want to handle a corner ahead of time, and stick to that route no matter what, even if your car is in the way. You want to drive the line, they want to drive the line, they pretend you're not there and bump you.


As is custom, starting out with the pros:
+The setting
I love the setting, the locale, and the feel of it all. Tall buildings in a dense city with plenty of lights, all on a backdrip with big winding mountainous routes. Hong Kong Island feels like the perfect locale for a racing game. The first 15 minutes of the game felt excellent too (apart from voice acting), where a rich celebrity welcomes you to the island and sponsors you in a race, explaining how the competition works and how rich spectators are watching. There's a cool near-future racing-focused corpo-world vibe to it all that, unfortunately, doesn't come up beyond the first 15 minutes. But you're still in Hong Kong Island at the end of the day.

+The Visuals
Visual engine is pretty good and I did get a lot of performance issues at the start, but they've been working on patching those and I don't really have trouble with game performance anymore. Everything looks pretty clean and the lighting is great, it all reflects well on the setting too.

Onto the negatives, which is unfortunately a longer list

-Always Online
You knew this was coming, and this was what I thought was the only real problem with the game before buying it, and I figured I could power through it. We all know why always online is usually bad, that's obviously still true and those usual things are what I was expecting. The reason I couldn't just play the game despite it is that this game took always-online further and seems hyper-designed for it. At the start of every race, you have to go through a lobby screen where other players can join, most of the time I just hit "start race" and don't bother waiting. But even if nobody else is in the game, I have to wait 10 more seconds to make sure everyone is ready I guess. Then if some weird physics thing flips my car at the start of a race, I can't restart the race because there's no singleplayer functionality what-so-ever, so I have to abandon the race and go through that whole starting process again. If you don't intend to race with other people, the game sure feels purpose-built to waste your time; honestly I did do some races with other people (only 1v1's because everyone else is also antisocial I suppose), and the game still felt like it was wasting my time.

-The physics
I can best describe the physics is "floaty", both in a handling sense and a literal airborne sense. Maybe I've gotten unlucky and happened to pick cars with no grip, but cornering without basically stopping is an impossibility for the earlier cars, and the DB11 in particular is incapable of existing without being in a drift; winning races like that isn't very hard, but I always figured they were aiming for a blend of realism with their arcadey feel. Though speaking of lack of realism, if your car ends up in the air, just forget about it, you're driving a hot air balloon now. It's like they forgot to set weight values for the cars. If you try to cut a corner just a little bit and there happens to be a divot, you're off the cliff. This is exacerbated by some random bits of awful geometry. Remember that "physics thing that flips my car" I mentioned earlier? That actually exists. Some curbs just have a ramp hidden in their collision box. Normally it shouldn't be an issue, I'm taking this corner at only 20mph after all, that shouldn't be fast enough for anything to put my car into a kickflip, and yet...

*Update*: I did end up playing a bit more to experience a bit more of the progression, and I will say that the handling gets drastically better, to the point it actually feels quite good, once you unlock Semi-slick tires. Bear in mind however, that you unlock these at reputation level 25

-The car list
Pretty weak. If you just go by sheer amount, then it seems decent, but most of us don't count the 5th version of the Ford GT as "variety". I'm lucky in that I don't have any issues with Lamborghini, but if you do, then we've struck out on 1/3rd of the roster already. Most of the variety comes from the super/hypercar categories and for example, when you hit the GT portion of the game, there are about 9 cars that you can use, so early on in the game, you won't have a lot to have fun with. Oh, by the way, Nissan, which features 2 cars in this game, is the only Asian manufacturer... in a game set in Hong Kong, so

-Content
The story disappears after minute 30, the whole championship thing and spectators thing that was introduced doesn't really exist anymore, you just get bulletins every 10 reputation levels that tell you new cars and a new event is available. I think their goal was to have the Solar Crown Championship be done through ranked matches against other players, which again just became a series of 1v1s. No houses as others have mentioned. The Domination race type is fundamentally flawed; it's a race where the winner is determined not by who crosses the finish line first, but who spent the most time in first. However, the races themselves are so short that in reality you're starting in positions 1-3 or you restart. There's the Streets vs Sharps clan thing but you just pick one and occasionally get extra clothes, it doesn't really matter; there are clan battle races but they're just normal races where placing higher gets you more clan points. Really it feels like there's nothing to do. You're not really earning anything, there's no story progression, you're just racing until your rep gets past a multiplier of 10 and then buying a car from a new category and racing it for a while

-Clutter
Nearly every road is either lined with pedestrian fencing or split through the median with bushes. In either case, hitting one slows you down, and they're all packed very close together so if you hit one, you're hitting 10 and basically braking. If you want these to slow you down, please don't put them literally everywhere. It's not fun to navigate this minefield and it greatly reduces the opportunities you have to overtake, because that overtaking space has bushes in the way that punish you for trying to overtake. This ends up just being another one of those seemingly small things that amounts to a major annoyance.
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In the end, like 4/10 game, and I only ever see it getting to 6/10 max if they add what they said this game will have (more cars, houses, story content, hopefully removing those random collision objects that send you flying, etc) because they're not going to change any of the always-online stuff; the game is already built entirely around it, they're not going to change the physics, and they're probably not going to change the clutter either. This game is packed with seemingly small things that end up being so annoying; the bushes/fences clutter, the 30 extra arbitrary seconds it takes to start a race, logging into the game starts you at your apartment and you can't open your map to get into your car until you walk to your door, not being able to restart a race. I just want to race cars but there's such insane friction to getting into a race that also doesn't end up being that fun. So the game is really annoying, and there's nothing compelling me to look past the annoyances and make progress toward.

From the very moment you launch the game, you're hit with pure style. The menu music is already sick, the protagonist reacts to your selections with animations, the narration is pretty corny but really fits in with the metal vibe. Then you perform your first slaughter (execution kill) DOOM-style and every bit of that animation follows the beat. It all fits together for a strong experience.

Obviously the soundtrack needs to be talked about. If you like metal, it's incredible frankly. A lot of music-based games that aren't literally "play a well-known song" like classic Guitar Hero style rhythm games have a problem where the music just doesn't feel full. I haven't played BPM, but I've heard the soundtrack and while it's good from a pure musicality standpoint, it's just missing some production elements or instrumentation that gives it that full sound. Metal: Hellsinger's soundtrack feels professionally recorded, mixed, and mastered the whole way through and can absolutely stand on its own as a true metal album rather than something that feels like it was produced for a game. And of course, there's some extra joy from hearing some of your favorite vocalists (and finding a couple new ones that I'll have to check out).

This is definitely a short game, even getting 100% of the achievements on hard (which you don't need to do, you can earn them on an easier difficulty, I'm just stubborn) took less than 10 hours, and some of that was spent tabbed out in menus/level select. Despite that short time, it was more than worth my money in sheer density of enjoyment.

The gameplay is great, and each weapon interacts with the beats a bit differently. The shotgun is on 2 and 4, or 1 and 3; the pistols are best hit on every beat; there's a weapon later on that's optimally 1 and 2, followed by 4 and 1, 3 and 4, 2 and 3, and so forth which is pretty neat. However, there are a few rare things that can break the flow, like getting stuck on an environmental object. And I've only run into one or two bugs really, one of which is great for speedrunners :P

Lastly, the devs really nail the idea of using the music to add to the feel of the moment; I have to draw attention to the last moments of the last song and how it so clearly fits with the solemnity and desperation of the final boss's last set of attacks.

First and foremost, this is a rhythm game that succeeds in being a game for rhythm gamers. You need to coordinate several different mechanics at once, the placement of the notes corresponds sensibly to the music, there's a high difficulty ceiling, and you can create your own charts. You'd be surprised how many rhythm games come out that miss this checklist. At the end of the day, rhythm game junkies like myself are looking for a game that they have to grind to get better at, and a game that makes you feel rewarded for nailing a new section correctly, of course while jamming out.

I'm not going to talk about quality of the songs because that's crazy subjective, but there's a wide range of electronic music so there's probably something you'll like.

There are three things that irk me, personally. First is that the jump between Expert and XD doesn't really have a natural bridge; XD introduces new patterns or mechanics that don't exist at slower speeds in Expert. Luckily, there's a practice mode where you can change the playback speed, so this doesn't end up being a huge problem. Second is that note placement makes a lot less musical sense when you're not playing on the XD difficulty, and can sometimes feel like there's no reason for a certain mechanic to be placed at a certain time; whereas in XD, spacebar pretty consistently plays around the bass drum or beat, spins feel like they're at impactful moments of the song, etc... The third thing I have an issue with is that some of the choices of note/beat/spin colors end up messing with my head, and I imagine would be a pretty big pain for those who are colorblind. Rest easy though, they're in the process right now of implementing accessibility options, including a full suite of color-customization for every type of note that shows up. That's the main reason I decided to write a review as well: Since I've had this game, there's been consistent updates and good transparency from the devs. When something takes longer than expected, they let us know and give us the aspects of the delayed update that they *are* ready to push, so big respect there.

I have a lot of fun with it already, and the devs have shown that they're actively working to make it even better.

I've started trying to find circles with paths in real life now. Send help.