Blur

 I recently received Blur from Gamefly as part of my monthly rental plan. Here's my opinion of the game: this game is mediocre, not great, but not terrible. I will say this, I did not finish it. Never even bothered with the multiplayer, so my review doesn't include that part of the game. 

The game in it's simplest terms is basically Mario Kart with better looking cars. In my opinion the game only really had two flaws, the physics engine/crash mechanic, and the AI.

In the campaign, which you must play if you want to unlock some of the better cars and power up mods for online play, these two flaws broke the game for me. I was planning on finishing the whole campaign and did get about 25% through it, but ultimately quit after having to put up with the games' weird physics engine and unfair AI.

The physics engine:  Okay, you might say what does a physics engine do in a game like this. Well, most of the time it just properly models vehicle behavior as you race around the various tracks. But it also affects crash behavior due to impact with other vehicles, power up effects, and stationary objects. The latter being the problem in the game. In the game when you crash into a stationary object one of two things can happen: the object breaks  and you can drive through it, or you come to a sudden and complete stop costing you approximately 1sec to a second and a half in race time - time that can be crucial to victory, especially in the Watchstop challenges and OneOnOne duels. In Watchstop challenges you race against the clock, racing from checkpoint to checkpoint until you've completed a certain number of laps. Time is critical in those challenges. In OneOnOne duels, you fight a boss racer to win the final challenge of a particular track. Victory unlocks the Boss' car and a Power Up Mod that can be added to all your vehicles. Now in these duels, speed is not always necessary, but with certain bosses it's critical. That's because, although many bosses can just be taken out of the race with sheer force and prudent use of power ups, some are physically so tough, that speed is your best weapon for defeating these bosses.

But just in general, losing any time in any of the many races, will leave you frustrated and forced to replay these races over and over again. 

The AI: The AI is tough. Even on Normal difficulty the campaign races and challenges will be very challenging. Here are some of the problems. First off, the Ai is much better at using direct fire aiming weapons, so you'll constantly get peppered with this type of weapons fire. Now, you yourself can use such power ups, but you'll find that for the exception of the lock on power ups and the area effect power ups, anything you have to aim while driving is not very easy to successfully use.

Secondly, the rubber-band effect. If you've played other racing games, you probably have first hand experience with this. What it is, is simply this: you're in the pack racing forward, suddenly you're in the lead, you surge ahead and take huge lead, you can't even see the nearest competitor, you lap and lap with no sign of any competitors, you reach the final lap, and just as you're nearing the finish line, out of nowhere two or three cars appear as if out of thin air and take your victory away by passing you or wrecking you. Well, this happens in this game quite often.

Finally, the other annoying Ai behavior that will piss you off quite often, is power up spamming. In particular, the Lightning Strike power up. The Lightning Strike power up is an area of effect power up. It deploys three areas of lightning  on the road, ahead of the leader. The lightning immediately disables any vehicles for a second to a second and a half, including yours if you enter it's area of effect, even if you were the one who deployed it. The Ai will often wait 'til you're in the lead to deploy it. But in particular, they'll wait 'til it's the last lap and you're in the lead. Then, you'll face multiple deployments of that power up all at once. Now, you can counter-act the effect of this spamming by planning ahead. Just always have the shield power up in your vehicle ready for deployment. The problem, not all the maps allow you to easily find the shield power up, and with all the other spamming, you'll usually have used it up just to get to the lead.

My Wrap Up: The annoying Ai behavior and strange physics engine really made the campaign not worth finishing. Plus other factors detracted me. Such as, certain races and challenges can only be completed by advancing further in the campaign and unlocking certain vehicles or power ups and then returning to these. The problem, the game doesn't tell you that. So you end up spending hours trying to complete a race or challenge you have no hope of accomplishing. And then there are the Achievements. Some of the achievements often worth only 10-20Gs require you fulfill 4-8 different requirements. Really? Just for some lousy 10Gs? Uggggh! The achievement structure seems designed to encourage multiple playthroughs and lots of online play. One last thing I should mention, the game doesn't have a lot of maps. So you'll end up doing multiple modes and races on the same maps. Which got to be very boring for me. And by the way, before the race starts, there is no over view of the track, so you'll have to perform multiple playthroughs to learn the tracks best.

I honestly enjoyed the first 2 hours of  this game. But after that, the game became a grind and there wasn't enough reward for the effort. I should have played some online multiplayer, but I was too bored and annoyed by then. Plus, I noticed that a lot of my friends who had played it also didn't play it for long, and very few even played the multiplayer, so I didn't bothered either. Figured I wasn't missing much.

Overall, the game seems mediocre to me, but I'm sure some one out there would love it. It just didn't do it for me.