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ANARCHY: RUSH HOUR (PS3)
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Publisher: 1C Company.
Developer: Gaijin Entertainment. Released: March 2010. Genre: Racing. Posted 26th October 2024. By Shane Battams © 2024 |
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On paper, Anarchy: Rush Hour seems a promising prospect: a combination of explosive driving in the same vein as Burnout and street racing mixing traditional circuit, Midnight Club-style checkpoint events and more gimmicky events. The idea could have worked well, even accounting for its digital-only release and smaller budget. Unfortunately for Gaijin Entertainment, their racer stumbles on the basics and ends up being a chore to play, with handling, physics and AI issues turning the driving into an ordeal. The core of the game is, frankly, a complete mess, and unfortunately for Anarchy, everything around the gameplay is also terrible.
A very bare story ties the racing together, with only two cut-scenes bookending the entire game and a slew of straightforward text messages serving up any prose. Max is a racer who gets a call from his estranged girlfriend, prompting a reunion. Sadly, this is cut short when she is kidnapped and consequently, Max begins racing for a trio of crews to attempt to pry information about Gaika’s location. A simple setup is somehow made insanely complicated in the second cut-scene, with a series of baffling reveals that even a daytime soap would deem gauche. Coupled with poor voice acting and dialogue that doesn’t even match the subtitles, and despite accounting for barely ten minutes of the experience, the story is atrocious.
Anarchy: Rush Hour fails to cover the basics, with terrible physics and brainless opponents resulting in some at-times farcical races
Sadly, things get even more dire once you enter your first vehicle. Rush Hour’s engine feels completely off, with skittish handling which often makes cornering hazardous. Brakes, which come with a horrid screeching sound, seem to be covered in grease as they take seconds to respond, forcing you to brake way before a corner for it to actually aid stopping. The physics are a complete joke, with a slight bump causing your featherweight vehicle to begin spinning in the air. And God forbid you use nitrous, because going at a higher speed seems to amplify all these issues and makes crashing almost inevitable. It’s lumbered with some of the worse driving mechanics around, with games like Burnout 3 from a generation before easily outclassing it. There are 40 different vehicles to use, with supposed stats influencing speed and weight, but the aforementioned issues affect you no matter which you use.
You’d think this would make winning any race very difficult, even with the ability to reset to the track. Luckily, however, the game’s artificial intelligence is some of the worst you would see both in and outside of the racing genre. The other drivers are clearly suffering all the above ailments, as they tend to spin out, smash into walls and drive speedily outside the course. They fail to offer any competition, as even on the hardest setting, they still suffer these issues. This idiocy spreads to both traffic and police AI, the former eagerly driving into you and the latter getting stuck on objects. The police presence is, in fact, pointless as they cannot bust you or cause you to fail a race. Some may find comedic value in this awfulness, but it also makes racing even worse.
You’d think this would make winning any race very difficult, even with the ability to reset to the track. Luckily, however, the game’s artificial intelligence is some of the worst you would see both in and outside of the racing genre. The other drivers are clearly suffering all the above ailments, as they tend to spin out, smash into walls and drive speedily outside the course. They fail to offer any competition, as even on the hardest setting, they still suffer these issues. This idiocy spreads to both traffic and police AI, the former eagerly driving into you and the latter getting stuck on objects. The police presence is, in fact, pointless as they cannot bust you or cause you to fail a race. Some may find comedic value in this awfulness, but it also makes racing even worse.
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These problems make the Story mode pretty easy, though not fun in the slightest. Standard circuit, free-form checkpoint racing, stunt events and anarchy challenges offer a varied spread of event types, yet all suffer from the aforementioned flaws. Not even power-ups, labelled Adrenalin devices, can spruce up the races, even if it lets you ram into other cars and send traffic flying with a blast. You can clear the main story in a couple of sittings, so quickly in fact you’ll likely have only raised money to buy a quarter of the cars, but most will tap out before that grind. You can set up a Quick Race as well, including in split-screen multiplayer and online modes. The latter did at least offer a smooth connection, though most sane people would rather challenge you to any other racing game on the console.
Things go from bad to worse with the presentation, with Anarchy perhaps being one of the ugliest PS3 games out there. The geometry is more basic than a PlayStation 2 game, vehicles look dodgy and poorly rendered, the world is rife with pop-in and woeful detail and performance is wildly inconsistent. Some tracks – namely, those without traffic – can run up to 60fps, though still suffer sharp drops. City tracks with traffic and weather effects cause the frame rate to tank, making for a sluggish experience. It’s visually abysmal. The only bright spot is explosive crashes, with a slow-motion crash being satisfying to watch initially. Unfortunately, seeing it a hundred times over grows old. The sound fares equally bad, with ear-piercing sound effects such as tyre screeching gifting migraines, sloppy voicework and generic music which constantly gets cut off by crashes as, for some reason, crashing changes the music track. A real assault on both the eyes and ears.
Things go from bad to worse with the presentation, with Anarchy perhaps being one of the ugliest PS3 games out there. The geometry is more basic than a PlayStation 2 game, vehicles look dodgy and poorly rendered, the world is rife with pop-in and woeful detail and performance is wildly inconsistent. Some tracks – namely, those without traffic – can run up to 60fps, though still suffer sharp drops. City tracks with traffic and weather effects cause the frame rate to tank, making for a sluggish experience. It’s visually abysmal. The only bright spot is explosive crashes, with a slow-motion crash being satisfying to watch initially. Unfortunately, seeing it a hundred times over grows old. The sound fares equally bad, with ear-piercing sound effects such as tyre screeching gifting migraines, sloppy voicework and generic music which constantly gets cut off by crashes as, for some reason, crashing changes the music track. A real assault on both the eyes and ears.
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There are many things to be said about Anarchy: Rush Hour. While its cheaper, digital-only price point could waive away some problems, the simple fact is this is one of the worst racing games available, and paying any quantity of money is tantamount to burning your cash. Horrendous to control, weighed down by terrible AI and afflicted by some of the worst visuals the console would see, just about everything that can go wrong with a game, does so here. While there are some destructive moments and the sheer awfulness can elicit some laughs, there’s nowhere near enough to recommend Anarchy. Avoid like a tyre puncture.
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VERDICT
"Horrendous to control, weighed down by terrible AI and afflicted by some of the ugliest visuals the console would see, Anarchy: Rush Hour is one of the worst racing games available." OVERALL: 2/10 |
OTHER GAMES THAT REWARD CRASHES REVIEWED
Burnout Revenge (2005, PlayStation 2)
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Danger Zone (2017, PlayStation 4)
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