A good ride that is missing the full option package
I’m the first to admit I know almost nothing about cars. I can start one, drive one, and can sometimes tell when something is wrong with one. For this reason among others, I more often than not fail to connect with racing simulators. In this genre, customization is king, but sometimes the sheer tonnage of options from racing games borders on oppressive. Do I really need to sift through thirty muffler types in order to get five extra horsepower? Enter Superstars V8 Racing, a PlayStation Network exclusive release from developer Milestone and publisher O-Games that promises a triple-A racing experience at a budget title price. Does it deliver? And will I need to spend an hour computing drag coefficients to get anywhere?
The first thing immediately evident is the level of polish in the game. Menus are easy to navigate, flowing smoothly from one to the other, though the save graphic starts to make a nuisance of itself after a while. In Superstars, you don’t so much select a car as a driver, who comes pre-packaged with the actual car he drives on the circuit. As such, don’t expect a legion of cars and drivers to choose from. Superstars’ close association with this one race series limits your options to the roster of drivers who competed on the circuit during the 2008 season. This unfortunately makes for a narrow range of choices, as race games go.
Once you’ve selected your driver, it’s time to choose a track. Superstars V8 Racing features reproductions of venues that see action in the Superstars race series, including Monza in Italy, Portimao in Portugal, and Kyalami in South Africa. The game offers a number of selectable driving aids to assist novices in keeping their super-charged sedan on the track, including traction control and automatic gear-shifting. With all this assistance enabled, the driving has a very arcade-like feel, however disabling all these aids ramps the difficulty up tremendously. Fortunately, the controller layout is completely customizable and I was able to easily remap functions to better suit my tastes. Additionally, like any racing game, Superstars offers a modest selection of equipment tweaks to tune cars for various conditions. So, if you’re one of those simmers who obsesses over the angle of your spoiler, have at it.
Once you’re satisfied with the who, what and where, it’s time to race. The single-player portion of the game has all the usual suspects: practice heats, one-off races, and a championship mode encompassing a season of contests and using a point system to rank performance. The game also offers a small but worthy Gran Turismo-style license mode presenting various challenges like a countdown mode that has you racing from checkpoint to checkpoint while being allotted only a few seconds between each one. Other challenges ask you to draft the car in front of you then use that reserve of power to pass and beat the other car. All the challenges focus on various aspects of the skills you’ll need to succeed on race day and I found myself spending most of my time with the game here, trying to pass and then master the challenges.
On balance, the driving felt solid, but as is true with most sims, the controller is a real performance barrier. Trying to maintain the proper line going into turns, coordinating braking — and shifting, if you enable the manual tranny — and fighting to hold your position in the pack using the thumbsticks, shoulder triggers and face buttons is like trying to walk, chew gum and make pancakes at the same time. A wheel peripheral will dramatically improve your enjoyment of the game, but mine was not supported, so know that going in and do your homework to ensure if you do get a wheel that it will work with the game.
The graphics are modest but polished, and actually quite good for a downloadable title. The fully licensed V8 sedans — this is the form factor of vehicle used on the Superstars circuit — from marquee automakers like BMW and Jaguar are well-modeled and the spitting images of their real-life counterparts. Steven Goldstein’s Audi RS4 that I used was a letter-perfect reproduction. I would have preferred some cockpit view options, including an actual rear-view mirror option in addition to the standard rear-facing view over the spoiler. I’m also partial to padlock views in sims that pan to the nearest threat. In this case, a click of the left thumbstick or so to show me the position of a challenging car would have been a great addition.
The track and environments were nothing spectacular. The tarmac textures of the various tracks were nice but the surrounding environments seemed bland and featureless in places. A lack of dynamic lighting compounded the blandness. Milestone needs to focus more on lighting and less on transient graphical assets like helicopters and blimps that add nothing. There is vehicle damage of the hanging bumper variety, but my Audi seemed in pretty good shape after three laps of my bumper car-style driving. Not a scratch in the paint or dented quarter panel to show for my kamikaze approach to competitive driving. Will there ever be a true disincentive in racing sims for simply bashing your way to the checkered flag?
The most problematic area for Superstars V8 Racing is the soundtrack. The music selection is ill-considered and, because the playlist is short, maddeningly repetitive. After only an hour or so, I turned the music completely off and was the happier man for it. But the audio problems don’t stop with the music. Engines don’t sound quite right and lack a real variety of procedural audio cues. Sound effects for gear changes don’t ring true, either, but then I’ve never driven a modified Audi RS4 through six gear changes to 135 mph so what do I know? When you mix in the sound of the helicopters buzzing the track — and something tells me you couldn’t hear a nuclear detonation outside if you were sitting inside a race car running at top speed — the entirety of the audio work for this title needs a reboot.
In addition to the problems cited above, there are some glaring omissions as well. Absent are audio cues from a crew chief letting you know about your progress in the race or references to telemetry data from the car. Coaching tips regarding turns or any number of other small bits of information would add an air of authenticity and contribute to the immersive quality of the experience. I’ll take that over the screeching intonations of death metal any day.
Superstars V8 Racing offers a surprisingly polished racing simulation experience for its price point but it’s not exactly the AAA title it claims to be. It lacks the breadth and depth of content customary in the upper echelons of this genre. Still, what it does it does well. The multiplayer component is barebones and suffers from some lag issues that can crop up at troubling moments during races, but it is functional. I was never in an online race with more than three other players, so I can only guess what the network performance would be like with a full compliment of competitors. The game offers a comfortable amount of customization but it is all internal, not cosmetic, so those of you looking to trick out your ride will have to look elsewhere. And, like any racing sim, you should also consider a wheel peripheral to get the most out of the game. It’s a small game at a small game’s price that offers a reasonable alternative to the pricier, more monolithic titles in the racing sim genre.
ComicsOnline gives Superstars V8 Racing 3 checkered flags out of 5.
Available only on PlayStation Network.
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