Review: Wipeout HD
Wipeout HD has been long awaited especially by its fans all the way back to 1995. Now it’s here, and for £12, it’s oddly cheap considering how good it is. In terms of graphics, Wipeout HD really lives up to its name. In 1080P, you’ll struggle to find any game that shines as nicely. With patches of dirt on the starting ships and gleaming metal on the later ones, it really takes credit for details. The look of each track is completely different from one another. Some are straightforward mini circuits while others are unforgiving sky circuits. Each and every detail on the track and the ships is clearly shown and doesn’t have a single blur effect to cover up any laziness. The awesome blur effects when you boost and spark when you barrel roll from a jump give you a real sense of danger and speed.
Graphically, this is probably the cleanest looking game I’ve even seen or played. Even the menu’s look like holographic images and completely take you away from any modern day feel. Best of all, not a single frame drop. Continuous 60 frames a second. If every game took this much care with its graphics, the PS3 would really be in its next gen era. The entire game consists of three options. A campaign, the “racebox” and online mode. The campaign is quite straight forward and consists of different modes. From Speeds laps, to new virtual races called Zones, chances are, campaign will ready you up for online mode and keep you going long enough to open more maps and vehicles. The only down side is, the races go from upsettingly easy to being more than challenging. A few more events in between to ready you up for the harder races could have been added. Racebox is just free play mode, letting you choose any map or vehicle as long as you have unlocked it from the campaign. It’s good for boosting your skills and getting to know the tracks and ships but isn’t a selling part of the game. Online mode is where Wipeout HD is really fun. Fighting off eight opponents with heat seeking missiles or getting them off your tail with mines never gets better. Don’t mistake it for a game like Crash Bandicoot racing though. To win a match on Wipeout, especially online, you need to be able to keep your eye on the track ahead while speeding around at 500mph and looking behind you to make sure someone isn’t going to blow you up or ram from the track. You will continuously be fighting for the next place, and if you lose concentration for one second, you’ll probably crash and burn. While you’re hurtling around a track, you don’t want to be plagued by the same song, over and over again until you want to find the band and assassinate them. As was the case with Feeder in Gran Turismo 3. Wipeout HD lets you play custom tracks.
A long awaited feature in any game. To choose a song, you just open up the pause menu, go down to “Audio Options” and flick through the songs which it automatically picks up from your Playstation’s hardrive. While this is a good feature, an MP3 button would have been a much quicker way of skipping track or choosing a different albums. Another small yet awesome effect is when you fly from a jump, the song distorts until you land. It completely integrates whatever song you play into the feel of the game. Even “Theme Of Laura” from Silent Hill 2 and “Phil Collins” somehow went well with the game.
While I’ve brought up only good points, which is quite rare, there is always one little flaw. The flaw is the amount of vehicles and customisation available. It would have been really good to have seen people with unique painted jobs online. Instead we see the same limited amount of ships with the same paint jobs. While the point of this is that you gain “loyalty” for various sponsors, it also takes away something which could have given it a finishing touch. This however is a small flaw and extra content for more ships could easily be added to the Playstation store. Wipeout HD is one of the most addictive games out there, especially online. The graphics are the cleanest around and I can’t stress enough how nice it looks in 1080P.
Online mode is the best part, and it’s rare to see players so far behind that all eight of you aren’t in the action. While the game lacks a huge amount of content, what content it does have is amazing, and for £12, you’d be missing out on one of the most deserved title of “Next Gen”.
Score: 8.5/10 – Don’t think twice about buying this. Take your mothers credit card if you have to. Reviewed by Sanctuary on a 50” 1080P Panasonic Viera.
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