Games based on movies are almost never good. It’s just a rule, this is how it’s always been, from the beginning of time. And why should they be? The people interested in a video game based on their favorite movie are going to buy it anyway, so why bother putting the extra time and effort in to make it actually good? Sure the developer may care, may bring some interesting ideas to the table. Hell, sometimes, extremely rarely, the stars align and we get an okay game. But usually a strict release schedule and a publisher who doesn’t want to spend any more than necessary to get the maximum cash from their license will quickly stifle any creativity and workmanship associated with the project.
Fast & Furious: Showdown is one of the more recent examples of a game that really has no meaningful purpose beyond making a quick buck. The game is developed across the pond by Firebrand studios who usually spend their time making racing games for the Nintendo DS. Perhaps this will help to explain why this game doesn’t look much better than most DS games.
Yes our first stop on the long list of problems are the visuals that have been rendered for our viewing pleasure. Showdown looks as though it was developed for the Playstation 2 ten years ago. And no, I’m not exaggerating. Here’s a side by side screenshot with Burnout 3, which you’ll note, was developed for the Playstation 2 nearly ten years ago.
Burnout 3 is pictured on right. It actually looks BETTER than Fast & Furious: Showdown.
But enough about graphics, I know what you really want to hear about: that gripping Fast & Furious plotline.
Despite being released the same month as Fast & Furious 6 the game seems to be mostly based around the events of the fifth movie. I hadn’t watched a Fast & Furious movie since 2 so I explicitly went back to figure out which movies this game fit into. After playing this game long enough the movies started to feel like Kubrickian masterpieces by comparison.
The game’s “plot” is stitched together by two female federal agents who are comparing notes regarding the incredibly wanted Toretto gang. Each mission in the game is essentially a retelling by these two agents as they track the gang’s activity across the world. Although the agents grow more connected to the plot towards the end of the game for the most part the story is uninteresting and feels largely disconnected from actual gameplay.
The voice acting in the game ranges from sub-par to “hey you gotta find a way to involve the producer’s niece in this thing.” Every mission begins with a short bit of dialogue between the two drivers and it is as un-skippable as it is unbearable. Some of these missions are very difficult and will require several retries but first you’re going to need to listen to that banter again. I now have pieces of the script memorized in parts of my brain that I can probably never reclaim.
Before each mission you’ll first be given the chance to choose between one of two characters and customize the car they’re driving. You can’t change the car, you can only customize the one that character has been assigned. Each character’s car will have different stats but usually there’s a definitively better one to choose. I spent forever stuck on a race until I exited back out to the title screen and chose the other character who had one star extra in each of their rankings for no discernible reason.
After you’ve picked your character you can also choose which modifications you’d like to install. As you play the game you will earn XP which will grant you more modifications. You can attach three mods to your car, and their effects range anywhere from raising your top speed to making your firearms shoot further. These mods can only be attached from the character select screen which means if you want to switch them out mid-game you’re going to have to completely exit out of your session and start over from the main menu.
To the game’s credit it does throw a lot of different activities your way. There are traditional races, elimination races, hijackings, mayhem missions, and the list goes on. The game has a heavy emphasis on co-op. You will have a partner with you on every mission and a second player can drop in at any point to take over their role. This is only allowed locally though. No one could be bothered to integrate some online co-op. If you can’t find a friend willing to live that Fast & Furious lifestyle with you most modes will let you switch back and forth between your two characters by pressing a button on the controller.
Unfortunately it’s hard to be grateful for being given so much to do when the engine behind it is so poorly built. Physics in the game range from bizarre to non-existant. Tracks are peppered with ramps to jump off of but if you’re going fast enough your car will inexplicably do a complete 180 landing you backwards on the track. I would say there was about a 30% chance I’d have that problem when going off a jump so eventually I just ignored them entirely.
Speaking of poor physics the cars have no real logic applied to them. You’ll go from one mission where your sports car can barely make a turn to another mission where you’re driving a semi truck that can do a hairpin turn on a dime. Car handling stats range from making turns feel impossible to make all the way to your car being too sensitive and causing you to over-correct every single time. Either way none of the cars are very much fun to drive.
Even in the game’s most creative moments things fall short. In one mission you’re tasked with using a tow cable fired via harpoon to take down a series of radio towers. The problem is that the tethering is almost completely random, I fired at the radio towers sometimes at point blank range and it would usually take five or six shots before I was able to successfully latch onto one. And forget letting your AI do it, although you can switch yourself to the driver’s seat for the mission, the AI will pretty much never successfully tether a tower, no matter how close you get. Of course you’re being fired upon by enemies this entire time, so no pressure or anything.
At one point I was mistakenly excited by receiving a “pulse gun”. The gun’s description is that you hold down the trigger to charge a pulse and then release it when you’re ready to fire, the longer you charge the more you’ll toss your opponent into the air. The problem? The gun only charges if you’re aiming directly at an enemy. If you start to charge the gun and the enemy moves to the side you lose whatever power you’ve built up. This means that rather than delivering an explosive blast that sends your opponents flying you’ll generally just cause them to experience a little bump and push them oh so slightly off the road. It was just another example of a mechanic I was excited for in theory but quickly grew tired of during execution.
Hijacking cars could have been fun, but all the quicktime events in the game only use one button. This usually leads to you finally regaining your balance on the top of your car only to leap right off of it into the street.
Finally Fast & Furious is king.
You should of course avoid Fast & Furious: Showdown. I think there were people on the development team who had some good ideas but I don’t think any of them were successfully implemented. If you’re hankering for some law-breaking action you could pick up Need For Speed: Most Wanted. If you want to push other cars off the road and generally cause havoc you could play Burnout: Paradise. Hell you could pick up both those games for about the same retail prices being asked for Fast & Furious: Showdown. Now there’s some good advice.
