REVIEW # 00000000 00011111
Winning is surviving!
Fatal Racing or Whiplash for the amercian market is a game halfway between Carmageddon (90% car combat, 10% racing) and a classic arcade style game. Here you don’t have to kill pedestrian or cows on the road but you always have 15 a$$holes to fight against. And trust me you won’t see the time to kick ass!
My heart says…
This is not a relaxing game so you have to play it when you’re calm. My huge mistake was playing it when I was upset and trust me, this is not a good thing. Even because there are always those slow and stupid Milion Plus going in reverse trying to hit ONLY you. However among the car combat game this is one of my favourites along with Carmageddon.
Splash screen
As for the rest of the graphics, the splash screen is amazing and leads you straight to the heart of the game: the skull that you see makes you think that is better to prepare to a death race…
Graphics
You can choose the VGA mode or the SVGA mode. It’s redundant to say that if you play the game now you have to avoid the VGA (that was made for less powerful computers). The graphics are grat if you consider the huge amount of textures and sprites the game has to load every second.
Is even better with the menus whic have a very clean graphics, beautiful colors and are quite “professional”.
Narrative
Gameplay
The game has basically three goals: win, be the fastest on track and kill as much opponent as you can.
There are three games mode: Single Race, Time Trial and Championship (the best one). You can choose among 8 different cars, each one with its particular key points (like, speed, accelerating, braking, resistance and so on).
In every race almost everyone can score point, from the 25 of the winner until the single point of the 15th, plus you can earn 1 point for the best lap and 1 point for killing an opponent.
The damage of the car is one of the most important part of the game, since it affects the speed and the acceleration primarily, so you have to be clever to look at the opponents who are almost wrecking their cars to give them the knockout blow. Fortunately you always have the possibility to pit to repair the car.
The action is hectic so sometimes is very difficult to understand what’s going on, you will only see a bunch of cars with smoke and fire and you can’t even tell if you’re going the right way or not.
There are only a few track but they features corkscrews, movable speedbumps, jumps and loops and when you’ll be skilled enough you can pass to another difficulty level (there are five).
Sound
Fatal Racing features good in-game musics and the sound effects are quite good. Th engines noise could soun a bit repetitive but it’s normal when you are all the race at maximum speed…
Longevity
3 games mode, 5 skill levels, 8 cars. There are all the ingredients for an high longevity game. In fact, even with the normal difficulty is not so easy to beat all the opponents and win the championship, so Fatal Racing will be a great challenge.
Final Score 74/100
Year: 1995
Developer: Gremlin Interactive
Publisher: Gremlin Interactive
Genre: Racing
Games Mode: Single Player, Multiplayer
Original Platform: MS-DOS
From same developers/publishers:
- Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge (1990)
- Premier Manager (1992)
Inspired to:
If you liked you can also try:
- Destruction Derby (1995)
- Burnout (2001)
Old Games
This game sounds pretty funny, with the cars going in reverse to hit you and trying to hit other cars while racing. It sounds fun, in a Burnout kind of way. Great review!
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Yes, the problem is that the cars SHOULD’T go in reverse! The developers thought it could have been a good idea to transform this game into a demolition derby style one. But actually is only upsetting because the assholes going in reverse don’t hit anybody else but you!
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Haha, those other drivers are really in it for you. They would sacrifice winning the race and go in reverse just to hit one car… Sheesh!
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