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Blur
combines the
power-up onslaught
of a weapon-based
racer with some
brilliant A.I. and
realistic driving
mechanics to make a
fun racing game.
Activision has a
winner with the
title, although it's
not in contention
for game of the
year.
The game is fun. The
main single player
mode to get through
is the career mode.
You go through a
variety of events to
gain 'lights' so you
can unlock a
one-on-one match
with another racer
to climb up the
ranks. You get
lights by winning or
placing events
including races and
destruction events.
You also have to
gain enough fans to
square off against
your opponent too.
You gain fans by
wrecking cars,
winning races, and
running through
gates consecutively.
There are a couple
of other checklist
items that you have
to get before you
can get to the
one-on-one race, but
the fans and the
lights are the most
important concepts
in
Blur. By
gaining lights you
unlock events, by
gaining fans you
unlock events and
cars.
The hierarchy of
lights and fans
keeps
Blur
interesting in the
single player mode,
but more than that
how challenging the
game can be makes it
more interesting.
The twenty car races
are brutal
onslaughts with the
A.I. being smart
enough to smoke you
with weapons time
after time. That and
the physics of the
cars being really
realistic make
Blur on the
normal setting a
hard game to beat.
The A.I. with the
weapons is really
the solid part of
the game. When your
opponent has
something to use
they use it
effectively instead
of carrying around
for the race or
wasting it. The
physics on the cars
are good too. You
need to be selective
with what car you
select for what race
because cars that
handle well don't do
good in speed-based
events and fast cars
do terrible on
tracks with lots of
turns.
Blur might
be too hard in the
middle and towards
the end of the game,
in the later levels
you might have to
choke down your
pride and switch the
difficulty to easy.
It could have been
slightly better in
that aspect, but you
can't gripe too much
about a game being
too challenging.
The multi-player in
Blur is
decent. Slower
connections will
struggle with the
twenty car events,
but the ten car
events and the team
races should work
fine across most
networks. The real
fun with
multi-player comes
with split-screen on
one console. It's
for up to four
players, and those
match-ups are fun
with a few friends.
Blur
has a lot going for
it. It's like Mario
Kart and Project
Gotham mixed
together. It has a
few problems- one
being it's too hard
in the later stages,
but it's a
serviceable racer
that you can get
into with a single
player mode and some
solid split screen
multiplayer.
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