Review by Matt S.
Story time, folks! Back when I was a young journalist money was tight to come by. Because young journalists don’t earn much money, see. Then one day I got an abscess in the mouth. Because dentists are expensive and because I was young and stupid I ignored it. And of course it burst.
Now, anyone who has ever experienced that will relate when I say that I wasn’t able to sleep for a week and couldn’t work, eat, or do anything by lie down and wish I was dead. Why am I telling this story?
Because I’d rather that happen again then ever have to play Chevrolet Camaro: Wild Ride, ever again.
Appalling doesn’t begin to describe this game. It starts off harmlessly enough with three different ways to play (“career,” “championship” and “time trial”), and five tracks (10, if you count the fact they’re all reversed) with nine cars, though most of those need to be unlocked as you play. For $5 AUD or so, that’s decent enough content in theory, and while the interface is low-budget, it’s forgivable.
But then the racing starts and the game falls to bits completely. In the world of Chevrolet Camaro cars can only turn in increments of 45 degrees. That’s right – a slight tap on the control stick and the car goes from driving straight ahead to literally twisting 90 degree to face a different direction completely. It’s an insane physics engine that makes smooth cornering impossible.
Thankfully the AI cars struggle with the same physics and are prone to drive off in random directions at the start of each race. It was a rare event indeed when I wasn’t the leader of the pack by the end of the first quarter of the first lap, and the opposition cars were not able to keep up after that, so for the rest of the game I struggled with the physics all alone in the empty, vast and very ugly landscapes.
“Vast” is an understatement, actually. A couple of the tracks take over 7 minutes to complete two laps, and while that doesn’t necessarily sound bad for a racing game, that’s 7 minutes of poorly designed tracks that feature very unremarkable environments and the pace of the racing itself is so sluggish that it feels like it takes ten times as long to get around as it does. But on one track you actually drive on the Great Wall of China. I guess that’s pretty “wild” and so the game’s subtitle is accurate, or it would be if it didn’t feel like I was piloting a slug instead of a car. The final straw was when I was driving along an especially thin piece of track and for some reason an AI car (which would have had to drive backwards to get there since it was near the end of the first lap and I was in first place) had parked across the track and decided to stop driving. Upon crashing into the car, the weird physics had be bouncing all over the place with very little room to manoeuvre back on to the track. That’s the point where I decided that Chevrolet Camero: Wild Ride is not just bad. It’s an outright travesty to game design.
– Matt S.
Editor-in-Chief
Find me on Twitter: @digitallydownld
