Another year goes by and another film from the Fast & Furious franchise is released, happy days as I am a huge fan of the recent reboot (seems to be a lot of reboots nowadays). Alongside that comes a video game, only the second console based game featuring the high octane series and this one is called Fast & Furious Showdown. Brought to us by Activision I expect a professional offering that isn’t just cashing in for a quick payday, but am I right... will my expectations be met? Keep reading.
The premise of the story mode labelled Fast & Furious is a mapping out of heists and goings on by two female DSS agents who work for Luke Hobbs. These events all seem to coincide with the latest film and even bridge gaps between “Fast Five” & “Fast & Furious 6”; you are the one recreating these heists, hijacks and chases.
Spanning across a healthy amount of missions, 30 to be exact, let me give you a little insight on the types of mission you will encounter. There are numerous race style ones where it’s either an straight forward first to the finish wins or team elimination where you have to prevent yourself and your team mate from being at the back of the pack while the clock counts down. Unfortunately the cars handle like tanks and with quite a few tight turns on every track you will most likely get behind and have to restart. This is quite a pain because taking up to 8 minutes to complete each one these are the longest missions (except for one) you will face.
Hijacks and heists are another regular feature; one rather neat idea was seeing you and the A.I. dragging a huge safe through the streets of Rio. I say neat idea because it doesn’t really work when it rolls around like it’s weightless and will frequently hit your own cars without a scratch but then send a cop car flying, the physics are flawed. Then we could be hijacking a tanker or lorry, after climbing onto the roof, a little button bashing then it will be over unless there are multiple targets.
Chasing is the other main type, whether you are the one being chased or not is the question, it can go both ways. Mainly though you will be swarmed by enemies and will need to take them out using a weapon which could be an SMG, EMP or Sticky Grenade launcher. Now I have two big issues here, firstly the A.I. will drive the car for you and most likely crash into everything in sight. Secondly the enemies spawn from thin air, ridiculous really for a modern day game not to at least have them come round a corner or something into sight. Nope instead they will just pop up whilst you are watching behind you.
The whole story mode is a mixed bag, the enjoyment I gained most from was the opening mission because you could drive into cars chasing you and wreck them with your front end flipping machine similar to a weapon you would see on Robot Wars. What ruined it for me was the frustrating team mate who at times drove you off cliffs or took you head on into a truck if you were the gunman. Luckily to get over this you can switch between characters on most levels but as I found I could steer the car to safety however it was hit and miss whether my gunman then took down the enemies. Would also like to point out the story isn’t told particularly well with the tiny cutscenes boring me entirely.
To add to my misery I saw that the Co-Op feature for all these missions is on the same system only, this shocked me a little as there isn’t an option for anything on Xbox Live. Moving on I tried the Challenge section, this was basically set playlists featuring survival missions, wrecking missions and much more. I had more fun trying to wreck my vehicle in the most stylish way possible and could make more of the unlockable car modifications that you unlock through levelling up in story mode. This mode is the one redeeming quality I found. To be honest the only drawback to these is the scores to gain gold medals are irrationally high in a couple of challenges.
Are you ready for more damning thoughts? Well here they are anyway; the story mode is incredibly short despite 30 missions they each range from 2 minutes to 8 or 10 minutes maximum. Graphically it takes me way back, probably as far back as the last offering of Fast & Furious on the PS2. Even the proper characters from the film are seen at a distance so you can sort of figure out it is them, however the voiceovers aren’t clear you can barely hear them but it doesn’t sound like the legit actors. The amount of vehicles on offer is poor, the ones they have look decent but there is only 3 per vehicle class maximum. The A.I. partner is exceptionally stupid and you are forced to have them unless you get a friend round to play with you.
Overall it feels as though it was made on a shoestring budget on top of a limited timescale, I for one would be ashamed if this represented my franchise. If I had to compare it to anything I would say it is a mix between Need for Speed, Burnout and Wheelman, unfortunately it doesn’t come anywhere close to either. In all fairness it probably deserved to be an XBLA game at 800MSP but instead an overpriced retail at £29.99 (this will drop significantly in no time). I wouldn’t bother even renting this but the Challenge mode is the only reason to in my opinion.
