To be frank the game is not complete; on a technical level everything's there – you've got a rudimentary 3D engine, plenty of cars, a main menu, some music and even a two player split screen mode. But building a game is a two stage process; yes you need all the core engine features, but these are just the tools that you use to build the final product, not the final goal posts. If you look at the developers' gantt charts you'll probably see every feature nicely ticked off and completed but time has not been spent on the significant steps required to transform a virtual environment into an engaging gaming experience.
Even the little details are off with an inconsistent UI design and minor usability issues littering the title. Visiting the car shop after a race, for example, resets the back command to actually exit out to the main menu, forcing you to reload the campaign. Then should you fail a mission the default option is to again back out to the title screen rather than replay the level, and there's no clear indication as to which of these is actually selected. Issues like this, or the way that car names are scrawled in a great big red lettering that looks like it was done in MS Paint are one thing, these are fairly ephemeral details, but the entire title is riddled with this lack of attention to detail.
There is a fundamental lack of player feedback throughout - the 'combat' in the game is not only rudimentary but entirely uninvolving thanks to a complete lack of any real damage indication. The cars have health bars above them which do admittedly go down over the course of the game, but when a player rams an opponent or hits them with a weapon the title doesn't engage with you. If you're lucky some scratches will appear on the bodywork and the bar will drop a little but there's no clear feedback loop. A problem compounded by the poor physics model that will sometimes see a tiny fender bender trigger a significant drop in health while a full-on nitro boost into the side can appear to do nothing. You're left with a scenario where half the time the player can be left wondering if they are even doing any damage at all.
This makes for combat that has absolutely no satisfaction whatsoever; players just have to cross their fingers and hope that the game is detecting their actions successfully. If that wasn't bad enough the one thing the game does do nearly every time you attack with your car's weaponry is to segway into a slow-motion third person view showing the same badly clipped animation, each and every time. Again, this is regardless of if and how much damage you are causing, and what you're seeing on screen has no correlation to the end result on the health bars either, there are not even any useful sound cues. You can block in an enemy vehicle and douse them with an entire tank of flamethrower fuel and see it shrug it off like nothing but have a significant portion of your health bar disappear and trigger a game over just for backing slowly into a wall.
Not to mention there's a reason why pretty much every other car combat game uses ranged weapons and that's because cars aren't the most wieldy of things to be performing melee based combat with (the Daytona cars in Fighters Megamix aside). There's really not much more to the combat than ram and ram again because every weapon type bar one is front mounted and short ranged. The one different armament is a short ranged, 360 degree area effect attack that lifts the opponents' cars up in the air and sends them spinning. Given that all the other cars have to enter the radius of this weapon to unleash their own attacks and that it works in every direction it's easily apparent exactly how much play testing went into balancing the vehicles. There are also other problems; certain cars with poorer handling just simply aren't worth taking because even if you get the first hit on target you can forget about lining up another one before getting pulverised in return. And given the unpredictable damage model it's never possible to judge when a particular shunt will trigger enough damage to make the risk of charging in worthwhile.
Then we have the different game modes, almost every one has something wrong with it. First there's Checkpoint, your standard time attack mode with a series of gates the player must pass through. The races are set in open environments and an arrow guides you to the next checkpoint; there is a mini map but the gates aren't shown on it. In almost every race there will be points where a checkpoint is placed right before a T-junction or other sharp turn decision with the next gate out of view and the arrow not updating until after you pass the gate in front of you. Which means that until you have memorised every turn for the track there will be times when you're looking at a blind 50-50 chance of completely messing it up. This is basic stuff that's just plain wrong. Not that it really matters as the time limits are so generous that you can still complete the courses in time regardless of major setbacks and there are no leaderboards to worry about.
Then there is Find the Teammate, where a friendly AI is hidden in one of several spawn points in the level and you must find them before the timer runs out. That's it, an empty level and a stationary car somewhere with no hints or clues. So it's a blind search until you learn the spawn points and then once you've learnt them you know where it will be anyway. Token Hunt is similar but with a number of tokens scattered around the level to pick up, albeit not so well hidden. Mosh pit is a destruction derby style free for all, except that it doesn't matter at all how many opponents you take out – you just need to survive until the end to win so occasionally driving away from the AI is enough to win that one.
Plant the Bomb is particularly broken - one amongst the enemy team will be carrying a bomb, which they must sit with for twenty seconds within a target location to plant the device. Whichever AI is carrying the bomb will become extremely passive, refusing to even use their weapons in self defence. Given the high planting timer, the tiny target location and the fact that the car will do nothing but slowly limp to the detonation location this mode essentially devolves into a normal deathmatch as no one ever manages to plant. What can be particularly bizarre is when the bomb transfers to the last remaining opponent mid way through a duel and they immediately stop fighting back, sometimes even stalling their car and refusing to move, leaving you hammering away at them for the next thirty seconds while they do nothing.
There are some other modes in the campaign, escorts and target assassinations included. The AI is similarly stupid in these, sometimes enemy attackers will get lost and stop chasing you. On one occasion the assassination target even got himself turned around and starting heading back to the start point from which he had originated. None of these are compelling and only serve to highlight how, regardless of the poor combat mechanics, the developers have not spent any time refining the framework that sits on top of their game engine. You can have the best physics and graphics in the world, not that Smash 'N' Survive does, but it's meaningless without a compelling, balanced series of challenges that engage the player with moments of excitement and challenge. It's like once the core mechanics were implemented the level structure was rapidly slapped on top and the game shipped without the usual cycles of playtesting and refinement.
Two player does little to improve the situation. Mosh pit is just the two of you, with no AI and no round based system – as soon as one of you wipes the other out for the first time it's game over. Plant the Bomb again features just the two players, with the same ridiculously long plant timers, it's pretty much impossible for a player to plant, even if their opponent is on the other side of the map they can still make it there in time and push the bomber out of the circle before their timer elapses. Unsurprisingly there's no online play. The end result is matches that are basic, repetitive and all too often over far too quickly, the overall experience is bare bones and derivative.
Graphics are middling, the levels are decent but buildings and and scenery lack any trim to break up the monotonous flat texture work. Disappointingly the designers have spent their time creating a large range of different bodywork pieces for all the different cars, that have no actual in game effect, while leaving many of the playfields bereft of detail. The cars do look very stylish, however, with some bold contouring and brash, over the top aesthetics that suit the game well. There's plenty of variety to their looks and these are undoubtedly the visual high point to the title, but this is easily offset against a nauseating, painful soundtrack that features the same two bars of heavy rock guitar riffing over and over again in the menus with some death metal vocalist intermittently belching on top of the mix.
Smash 'N' Survive is broken on so many levels, the graphics engine is decent but rudimentary, the level design is lacking with frustrating issues like destructible walls placed directly in front of non-destructible ones, and the physics model is either bugged or simply illogical. The missions are drab and uninspired and the multiplayer is dialled in and lacking in dynamism. Not to mention the core concept is fundamentally flawed in its own right by marrying close combat with a single health bar damage system, which removes any hope of real depth. Very disappointing.
Players:
1-2
Genre:
Racer
Developer:
Version2Games Limited
Publisher:
Version2Games Limited
Platform:
Sony PS3 PSN
Version:
European
Pros:
-Cars look good.
Cons:
-Poor physics modelling.
-Some very bad AI.
-Uninspired game modes.
-Empty multiplayer experience.
Score: 2/10