WipEout HD

The Wipeout series has been going since the early days of the original PlayStation. While its star had fallen somewhat by the time the PS2 rolled around, developers Liverpool Studio had since done a great job bringing it back to basics with Wipeout Pure and Pulse on the PSP. Now Wipeout HD is here, and features a bunch of tracks from those two portable titles, all souped up in glorious high definition.

For the most part, it’s a successful game. The graphics are extremely crisp and smoth, running at a silky 60 frames per second. The action gets very, very intense as you work your way through the speed levels, and captures the frantic energy inherent in the best Wipeout titles.

The basic gameplay remains unchanged – you have to juggle super fast racing with ship-to-ship combat. Along the ground are a series of weapon pickups that give you a random tool of destruction to use. These range from a simple machine gun to a quake weapon that rips up the track in front of you. The weapons are really what make Wipeout stand out from the crowd, and makes every race that much more intense – you’ll really need to multitask if you want to survive to the end of the course.

Beyond that, there are a number of different race modes to keep things interesting. The usual assortment of speed laps, time trials, and standard races are there, but the real star of the alternative lot is the Zone mode. This mode keeps the acceleration pressed down at all times, and has you racing along one of the tracks (redone in some spiffy stylised graphics) for as long as possible until you blow up from simply hitting the walls too many times. What makes it ridiculously frantic is that the speed you’re travelling at is constantly rising, meaning towards the end you’ll be crashing all over the place. It’s a great addition, and it would have been nice to see more modes like this (such as the Elimination mode found in the PSP games).

There are a few problems, of course. The learning curve is likely to get many new users hurling their controllers in frustration – after the initial set of levels in the Campaign mode, it suddenly seems to ramp up in difficulty. You may find that even having the AI on novice doesn’t help you survive to the end of a race, let alone coming in first. It’s a real shame, as previous Wipeout titles were much more forgiving in the initial stages.

The customisation options found in Pulse are also absent here – instead, each hover car can only be given a couple of different skins. Still, all that is mere dressing beside the highly polished gameplay.

Online multiplayer works well (depending on your internet connection, of course), and even the options for split screen racing are fleshed out. Beyond that, this game features everything you’d expect such a Wipeout game to have, including a great techno-oriented soundtrack.

For roughly NZ $33, this game really is a steal. It contains enough content to warrant an actual off-the-shelf product, so it’s really encouraging to see it so cheap. There’s a lot to like here, but new users should be warned: you’re going to get your arse kicked for a while before you really get the hang of it. If you’re prepared for some frustration, however, this is one of the more fun arcade racers around.