Movies and video games have shared a rocky relationship over the years. Great movies often inspire terrible video games and sometimes great video games cause Hollywood to shit out a movie-shaped turd based on that hit game. Very seldom do these two different mediums share the same measure of success. Firebrand and Activision teamed up to monopolize on the success of the Fast and Furious series of films with Fast and Furious: Showdown.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yjqVOKe8TE
I started to suspect that I may not be playing a quality racing title almost immediately, and a half hour later my wife had to talk me down from the ledge of the Bank of America building. I did many things I didn’t want to do for the benefit of our valued 2old2play readers: I spent hours writing and researching new game releases; I tuned, researched, and tested every car in every Forza car pack; I even played Aliens: Colonial Marines all the way through to the end, and I was happy to do it, dear reader, but there is no fucking way I’m putting this putrid piece of shit back into my console.
The first, and most evident, problem with Showdown is the fact that it rewrites, recasts, and reassembles every Fast and Furious movie. Remember in Fast 5 when Dom and Brian dragged a stolen vault through the streets of Rio de Janeiro in a couple of Chargers? Maybe I’m confused, because Firebrand has Tej and Brian driving the strangely wide and deserted streets of Rio, in a pair of Chargers, dragging a feather fucking pillow shaped like Hernan Reyes’ vault. Who knew that a vault that size has no actual weight, or maybe that was due to the stupidly absent game physics, because it seemed much heavier in the movies.
Hey, do you remember that time that Brian invited his friend from Miami, Tej, to come to Los Angeles to race on a freeway straight out of Cruisin USA? Yeah, me neither. The incredible lack of imagination and originality on these tracks almost makes me think that they owe the Pole Position programmers some royalties. Why is Tej even racing? I cannot honestly remember him even driving in any of the movies. Did I miss that part or something? I saw Dom race, and Brian, and Han, and Roman, and Letty, but never Tej. Why didn’t they just stick fucking Agent Hobbs behind the wheel? It would make about as much sense.
Hey, do you remember that time that I recommended that everyone go out and pick up a copy of Fast and Furious: Showdown? Yeah, that’s not going to happen either. This game is the equivalent of Carrot Top: The Movie. I would rather grind my lips off with a cheese grater than play another fifteen minutes of this game. The physics are bad..way, way bad. There’s no rhyme or reason for the plot, the shooting part sucks almost as much as the driving, the levels are preposterously uninspired, and the difficulty switches from super easy to Ninja Gaiden for no reason. At 40 dollars, Activision is still charging 60 dollars too much. Don’t buy it, don’t rent it, don’t even stand next to it.
Final Verdict
Fast and Furious: Showdown can suck it.
