Release: Sep 25 2008
Developer: Sony Studio Liverpool
Publisher: Sony
Genre: Racing
When WipEout first hit the PlayStation platform back in 1995, it was a visual marvel that combined speed and technical racing skill with weapons and the ability to use armaments to either eliminate your competition or to propel your anti-gravity craft to victory. 13 years, several sequels, and two console generations later, WipEout HD follows the same formula, complete with an impressive audio/visual presentation, challenging track design, and an arguably punishing difficulty curve. The real questions here are whether the game is not only worth playing repeatedly in order to improve enough to unlock everything that the title has to offer, and also whether the game is worth its $20 price tag…and this review will definitively answer those questions.
Ramping Up
For the uninitiated, WipEout is a racing game that utilizes anti-gravity craft instead of more traditional racing vehicles. The tracks are set in visually appealing environments and each track is littered with boost pads (which provide an extra burst of speed when passed over) and weapon pads that randomly arm your craft with one of several weapons or assist features that can literally make or break a race. Each craft has a finite amount of energy, which is depleted when the craft comes into contact with a wall or is struck by weapons fire; once this energy level hits zero, the ship explodes and is eliminated from race contention. The powerups range from missiles and cannons to turbo boosts, shields, and an Autopilot feature, which is extremely useful when attempting to negotiate tight turns. The popular Quake weapon returns here, and seeing its carnage on-screen in buttery HD is a sight to see.
WipEout HD also features a barrel roll move, which grants a speed boost after a successful landing from mid-air; however, the move does come with the disadvantage of robbing precious energy from your craft for each maneuver – so this ability should be used with discretion.
A Zone Trial
Objectives vary, depending on which event you’re playing. WipEout HD features standard Races and Tournaments (races over multiple tracks), as well as Time Trials and Speed Laps to test your technical prowess and shave those extra few tenths of a second off of your best times. There’s also a Zone race, which gradually increases your speed as you run infinite laps around the same track. Zone events get hard over time, though, and once you scrape or hit the wall too many times and run out of energy, the event ends. Zone events are addictive; you’ll find yourself wanting to try more than a few times to best your own record and see how fast your craft can go without demolishing it.
WipEout HD‘s main mode of play for solo racers lies in the Campaign mode. This mode consists of eight events, each with its series of challenges. These challenges are made up of the race modes listed above, as well as tournaments, and take place over a series of tracks. Points are awarded in each event based on medals that are earned, and players must accumulate a set number of points before the next event is unlocked. As you progress through the Campaign mode, you will unlock new tracks and new skins for your anti-gravity craft. Completists will want to shoot for gold medals across the board, but it’s possible to earn just enough points to move on to the next event – and, if you’re good enough, you may not even have to participate in all of the races in an event to unlock the next one. Trophy hounds, however, will want to at least medal each race in each event. (Yes, that’s a hint.)
The Difficulty: Not Exactly a Curve
Races WILL Test Your Skills
As one would expect in a WipEout HD Campaign mode, the difficulty curve gradually increases from event to event. What’s surprising – and a little disappointing – is that the curve arguably ramps up too quickly. The first event is as it should be: easy enough so that players of all skill levels should have few problems completing races and earning medals in some form. The second event is somewhat more challenging, and one or two of the races here can take multiple tries to earn a medal. But the overall event is still level enough in terms of difficulty that, with some persistence, access to the next event can be achieved.
Starting with the third event, though, the game gets remarkably difficult. While achieving bronze medals is quite possible with some repeat plays and added effort, you need more than a few medals other than bronze in order to unlock the next event– and the game gets harder still from there. Punishing difficulty isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can be argued that the transition from easy to hard happens much too quickly here, especially for players who haven’t played WipEout before. It’s a love note to old school WipEout fanatics, but it’s bittersweet.
Initially, at least, players with strong wills can use the Racebox mode to hone their racing skills. Racebox allows players to run races on previously unlocked tracks using all of the different race modes. If you’re having trouble clearing Zone 20 in the Zone mode, you can practice it here and get a feel for how speed increases will affect the handling of the craft around certain corners. If you’re having trouble winning a race because you’re unfamiliar with a track layout, run a Speed Lap or Time Trial race to familiarize yourself with the track. Many players will undoubtedly find that spending generous amounts of time with Racebox mode will improve their Campaign mode performances in some way.
Multiplayer Mayhem
A close call: Double Tap your airbrake to avoid trouble
If you find yourself getting frustrated by the Campaign mode, or want some multiplayer action, WipEout HD‘s online races are excellent. There’s little in the way of lag, so online races feel almost like offline ones, but you can school your friends or total strangers this way, while improving your online stats and even picking up a few Trophies along the way. Interestingly enough, self-eliminations seem to be more commonplace than they probably should be, so as long as you stay on the track and don’t hit too many walls, you likely will have a fighting chance in most races.
Speaking of Trophies, WipEout HD has 38 of them to earn, ranging from winning online races to achieving a barrel roll. There’s even a rare Platinum Trophy for earning the 37 others, so Trophy hunters will have plenty of work ahead in WipEout HD in order to unlock all of them.
So THIS is what Vertigo feels like
1080perfect
When it comes to aesthetics, WipEout HD is one impressive package. Quite literally, the visuals that are delivered here are what the original WipEout had been striving for back in 1995. Each track is alive with flashing lights and moving craft, and each anti-gravity craft is impressive to behold in terms of the level of detail and ship design. The frame rate remains locked at 60 frames per second, which is impressive enough… but when you add the breakneck speeds that this game is capable of displaying, it becomes that much more of a visual tour-de-force. If you’d like to show off the visuals to someone, the Photo Mode allows you to snap still shots of the race replay, add effects, and save it to your hard drive. The screenshots you see accompanying this review were all taken with this feature, and as you can see they look fantastic.
Freeze Frame=Pretty. In Full Motion=Breathtaking
An example of Speed Blur applied to the screenshot
Aural Sensations
The soundtrack is what fans of the series have come to expect, with techno music that enhances the game’s futuristic feel. If techno isn’t your thing, though, WipEout HD supports custom soundtracks. One thing worth mentioning in terms of the music is that, no matter whether you’re listening to the default soundtrack or music from your hard drive, the game seamlessly adds effects to the music during certain parts of a race, such as echo. That’s pretty neat.
The Final Verdict
As I mentioned in the opening of this review, there are two questions that need to be answered here.
The first question is whether WipEout HD is addictive enough to want to replay multiple times in order to unlock everything that the game has to offer, and that’s the tougher of the questions to answer. Your mileage, if you’ll pardon the pun, may vary… but I say that the answer to this question is a reserved yes. There are some extremely addictive qualities here; the Zone races are addictive enough, and fans of racing games will certainly enjoy the challenge of trying to best their own personal lap times and the times set by their online peers. Despite this, an aura of frustration is sure to be felt by many players who may feel as though the odds are stacked against them and that they can’t advance to a new event because their previous results just aren’t good enough. Indeed, there can be some criticism levied towards the design decision to ramp up the difficulty so unevenly… but it’s also entirely possible for the frustration of the Campaign mode to be mitigated by taking part in online races or by playing in Racebox mode.
As for whether WipEout HD is worth $20, that’s much easier to answer: you bet it is.
If you consider what Studio Liverpool has put together for this package – a full Campaign mode, online play, Racebox mode, Trophy support, an awesome audiovisual presentation, and custom soundtrack support – it’s entirely feasible that this game could have been released on a Blu-ray disc and sold for more than $20. I don’t know if it’s a $60 game, but I could see a price tag of more than $20 which would be worth paying.
This is the best WipEout game I’ve played since WipEout XL back in 1996. It may be frustrating at times, but WipEout HD is definitely a game that must be experienced by every PlayStation 3 owner. Buy it now.
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