Wipeout review by Tyson

Overall

Buy

     Wipeout is a fantastic futuristic arcade racing game for the PlayStation console. If you enjoy your racing games with high speed, plenty of items, and challenging tracks then Wipeout is the game for you.


Gameplay

     Wipeout is one of those racing games that seems like they took some of my favorite Super Nintendo racing games like Super Mario Kart and F-Zero and baked them together to form some kind of tasty treat. In Wipeout you race hovercraft like vehicles through various futuristic tracks in gameplay modes like championship or time trials. Your main goal in each mode is to come in a high place as possible. You start out playing in the games Venom class, which is the slowest speed setting, but winning first place in the championship mode will unlock the faster Rapier speed setting. If there is one area that Wipeout disappointed me in it is that playing the two player mode requires you to connect multiple PlayStations together using the serial ports. It sucks that the game couldn’t do some kind of split screen mode.

     I had a lot of fun going through each of the games courses. Each course got more challenging and brought their own designs to the game which I liked. The first course for example is fairly simple with easy turns and a nice long slope but later course have you taking tight turns and picking up speed boosts through narrow sections of a course. What also makes later courses challenging is that touching the edge of the course will slow you down a lot. I noticed that on some courses no matter how well I played I could never seem to catch up to the second or first placed racer. This made the game a little frustrating for me but it didn’t make the game unplayable for me as well.

     Much like other racing games such as Super Mario Kart you can pick up items to help you out. You have offensive items like rockets or hovercraft seeking missiles. While defensively you only have a shield and a temporary speed boost. From what I can tell it is random on what item you pick up once you fly over an item pad and this can cause some balance issues. It sucks getting the floating mines weapon again and again but there is also that rare chance you can get something like mutliple speed boosts which can help you out a lot.


Control

     Wipeout is one of those games that controls very well. I had no problem controlling my hovercraft and I liked how you could do tight turns using the shoulder buttons.


Graphics

     Even though Wipeout is a very early PlayStation title it looks amazing to me. The game runs at a very good framerate, the courses and hovercrafts looks great, and I liked some little touches like seeing a picture of your racers reaction after finishing a race. The only flaw with the graphics had to be the draw distance. The environment would pop in at a fairly close distance.


Sound

     The soundtrack in Wipeout is mostly techno style music and if you enjoy that genre then you will love the background music here. I found the music to be good even though I am not that into techno. I did come away liking the sounds effects ranging from the hovercrafts to the announcer that would announce what weapons a nearby racer is using.