Blur is a racing game. Yaniv doesn’t mix well with racing games. So logic states that Yaniv did not like Blur. Here comes a shocker: Yaniv spent a shamelessly fun 13 hours with with Blur this last week! Come on in viewer, and let good ol’ Yaniv show you the ups and many downs of this here racing game!
Activision‘s newest racing IP, Blur, straddles an almost perfect line between Bizzare’s earlier Project Gotham games, and the likes of Mario Kart or even Full Auto. The game captures the technicality of pseudo-racing sims like Gotham, while keeping the races interesting with Mario Kart like power-ups. The power-ups are the standard fare; nitrous boost, mine, bolt cannon, shield and a few others. Commendably, the powered-up racing mechanic fits well with the game (seeing as its the game’s ‘big idea’) and doesn’t distract players from the all important steering wheel. At no point did I feel like I was fighting with the car to aim a power-up, or that I was too hampered by the other car’s attacks to drive properly. The enemy placed mines and thunder bolts helped keep the track fresh, and congested the driving line; every lap around presented something new to drive through/around/over. Thankfully, the ‘gimmick’ of Blur turned out to be a great selling point.
Although fun, Blur is a lap behind the rest of the pack. The graphics, though pretty, look like they’ve been around for at least a year, at best, at worst, they’re comparable to PGR3. The cars look slick in still screens, but in motion, the jaggies start popping up all across the model, and the logos on the cars themselves look like they were up scaled in MS Paint and stuck on the car; pixels everywhere! The effects from power-ups look sub-par, as if they were made during an afternoon in highschool graphic design class. The licensed cars wreak, but just barely, slamming head on into a pillar, going at 120MPH will only put a slight dent in the hood, if you’re looking for destruction, look elsewhere. The game isn’t hard to look at or anything, it’s pretty at some points, but it has such terrible lows, lows that aren’t acceptable in our generation of gaming.
Blur seems like it’s a step behind the competition in almost all ways. The online is robust, with ranking and car upgrade systems, but the dreary monotony of the game will deter most from ever unlocking the higher stages of the multiplayer experience. The singleplayer has a story like structure, but it feels like they ripped the story out just minutes before putting the game on shelves. There’s a character that you don’t get to create sitting in the drivers seat (he looks exactly like the douche I would have made if they had given me an option) and a fem fetal narrator, who vividly describes all the boss characters… who do nothing out of the ordinary at all. The game feels old, yet it only just came out. The only modern feature I could find was a robust way to tell all of your friends that you’re simply player Blur; the game connects to Twitter and Facebook, as well as Blur.com, where you can download all of the sick pics you took in the game (a neat feature indeed). Other than a way to annoy your friends, there’s not much of a innovation when it comes to this gametape.
The final word on this is that Blur is nothing special, and it doesn’t try to be. There’s no stylized feel, not even proper music. The only music in the game has to be manually turned on in the main menu, if its not, the player is stuck listening to nothing but engine rev. for the entirety of the game. The rush regularly associated with racing games simply isn’t included in the package when you buy Blur. Blur is not a bad game, by any stretch, but its not an A lister, I’d be hard pressed even to fit in on the B list. A fun romp, to be sure, but its a rental, not a purchase. Blur is a weekend getaway, not a vacation staple; it’ll keep you coming back for a little while, but if you’re interested in racing, there are more interesting fish in the sea.
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