Spin-off. It’s a term that is rarely used in a positive way. Most video game spin-offs are just money grabbing cash-ins to try and get a different kind of audience on-board, even if it’s only for a brief moment. They used to come out as budget games, usually tied to some movie coming out but now, the Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network and Steam platforms have taken over as the dumping ground. We’ve already had Halo: Spartan Assault earlier this year and now in the racing scene we have WRC Powerslide from the developers of last year’s WRC4 and MotoGP 13, Milestone. Just like Spartan Assault, the issue is not that the game is bad, the issue is that it’s not remarkable in any meaningful way.
WRC Powerslide is an arcade style game through and through. The first thing you see after pressing the start button is your basic menu screen with your two gameplay options been single-player and multi-player. You’ll spend pretty much all of your time playing single-player since at least at the time of writing, I haven’t been able to get into an online match. The one time I did find a server, it stayed in the connecting screen for ten minutes until I finally lost my patience. It’s too bad, because with the power-ups and pick up and play controls, I’d assume that this game would be a lot more fun with a group of friends than solo.
That leads me to one of the games oddities though. Being an arcade racer, it has power-ups, sort of like Mario Kart or Sonic All Stars Racing. There is an option to turn this off but without also turning off collisions, meaning that all your opponents are basically ghosts you can drive through. I’m sure there’s someone out there that would want to play this game without the power-ups but with collisions, so why would they not make that an option? Why limit such things when they obviously aren’t limited technically?
This lack of choice also extends to the single-player mode. Many racing games suffer from having their career modes just feel like a check list, finishing events in a predictable fashion in order to get the next track or car. WRC Powerslide goes one step further, by forcing you to use a specific class of car on a track of it’s choosing in order to unlock the next course. On top of that, the same pattern repeats throughout the entire game. This means that the repetitive racing gets dull very quickly. That’s too bad because the driving controls are rock solid. The physics can feel a little over done in spots but for the most part, the core gameplay is solid. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to back it up. The A.I. suffers from rubber banding no matter which difficulty setting you put it on, there’s only six power-ups to use and all the cars feel nearly identical to each other.
Same thing can be said for the presentation. I will give credit and say that the environments do feel varied and look good for an arcade title. The same can’t be said for the sound though. Car engines and power-ups won’t make your ears bleed but the awful soundtrack will. I don’t know what the total song count is but I feel like I can put it on one hand and all of it is generic rock that is easily beaten by most royalty free albums.
Ultimately, WRC Powerslide is the perfect example of an average game and it’s hard to recommend when there are better arcade racers on the market. That being said, with a low purchase price of $9.99 you’ve likely spent your money on worse decisions and you might get at least some fun out of this budget title. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.
