Not much of a choice is it: Speed or Death? We’ll opt for Speed. But there’s a third option, which is ‘get lost’. We have no idea where the hell we’re going in Speed or Death, and the developers could have done with drawing us a map.
If you had told us that Speed or Death would most remind us most of Die Hard Trilogy, then we would have been there in a shot. It’s reminiscent of the racing ‘third’ of that game, where you got behind the wheel of Die Hard With a Vengeance’s iconic taxi and leathered it around New York, sliding into bombs. Speed or Death has the spirit of that classic PS1 game, but not quite the panache.
In Speed or Death, you are given four tracks to romp around in. Each one has you choosing a car and then following a series of arrows. A time limit ticks down in an arcade style, and you need to reach the next checkpoint to replenish it, all the way to a final checkpoint.
The complication is that these are races through disaster movies. In Money City Rampage, a Godzilla-like creature starts stomping about; in Disaster in a Desert, sandworms eat up a military facility; in Gold End Volcano there are meteors and dragons; in Race Against Space it’s aliens. Their antics cause the track to explode, switch lanes, create dead-ends and other real-time obstacles. You have to have your wits about you, as a clear path can become dragon-scorched in a matter of seconds.
Split/Second comes to mind, but with less AAA bluster and a greater emphasis on racing against the clock, rather than beating opponents. Your aim will commonly be to beat your old time, beat your previous progress, or just know where the bloody hell you’re going.
Let’s get it out of the way early, because it’s dominant. Speed or Death is a cacophony of stuff. Lots of things are happening, and it’s not only the aliens and dragons around you. Often there will be soldiers firing, rocks tumbling from cliffs and all sorts of other distractions. It’s flipping great in concept, and we’re hugely impressed that a budget game – Speed or Death is only £6.69 – can cram in so many over-the-top pyrotechnics. Rarely is an event reused from elsewhere. It’s all new and entirely surprising.
But it’s almost too much. Speed or Death is more interested in screaming “waaaaaah!!!” in your face repeatedly than it is in telling you where to go. There are onscreen arrows, but they’re inconsistent. Sometimes they appear too late to really help, sometimes they don’t turn up at all. On occasion, the situation can’t even be helped by an arrow: when you’re jumping over a ramp, or trying to navigate a canyon with a multitude of optional paths, for example. The accumulated result is that you simply don’t know where to go. We have played Money City Rampage ten or twelve times and we still couldn‘t tell you where you’re meant to go after being chased by Godzilla. We’ve had to move on to the other races.
It’s not just the arrows’ fault. The tracks just aren’t legible. There’s a sequence in Race Against Space where you have to drive over rocks that – in a previous part of the race – caused you to crash. Narrow tracks are hidden and nearly impossible to see. Speed or Death needed to be magnitudes clearer about where you need to go, simply because there’s so much else clamouring for your attention. You don’t want to be working out how to get from A to B when someone is dancing naked in front of you.
But Speed or Death is designed for replay. There are four tracks for a reason, as it desperately wants you to learn, get better and optimise. New cars get unlocked as you find secret routes through the maps, and suddenly you have the ability to generate better times. It’s almost like a roguelike in that sense: you will be rubbish on the first go, but the point is to persist and unlock something better for a future run. We wanted to be whipped up in that stuff.
That approach would work if there wasn’t a niggling sense of the game being unfair. In Money City Rampage, there’s a jump that simply isn’t possible to clear unless you have one of the better cars. Sure, you respawn afterwards (although there is a tendency to respawn you backwards, on rocks, upside down, etc), but valuable time has been lost. Plus it’s the sheer mean-spiritedness of it. There are similar moments in Gold End Volcano, where falling into lava will cause you to respawn in lava again and again. Rather unfortunately, the issues in the tracks tend to come towards the race’s end, so you can have a perfect race, only for it all to be undone.
If the cars in Speed or Death felt superb to drive, we’d be making excuses. But they’re merely okay: perhaps better than you might expect from a £6.69 game, but lacking the manouverability and control that you need when avoiding cars as aliens blast holes in the track. The cars are leaden and hard to swing round a corner, even with a handbrake turn.
We’re certainly not taking aim at the ambition of Speed or Death. It’s a game that tries to improve on Split/Second, which was such a big operation that it sank a AAA studio. But the experience is too far off the mark in terms of guidance, knowing the hell where to go, and general polish. On occasion, it even verges on the unplayable.
Speed or Death is that rare example of a game that demands a sequel or rework, as the idea is great, but the execution is way, way off.
