The Mario Kart and WipEout series of racing games are both terrific fun, and one of the many reasons these games offer a consistently enjoyable experience is because of the way each game handles and balances the complex question of minute-to-minute and second-to-second player choice. Not only do both games feature (generally) enjoyable track design, but they also feature competitive racing, with an array of power-ups on the track to pick up and use to gain an advantage during a race.

While in the heat of battle, dozens of decisions are constantly flowing through a player’s mind depending on their position on the track, their position in the race, and their currently held power-up. Through these decisions, a continually changing racing strategy is unfolding in that player’s brain, in order to best figure out how to win that race.

What Mario Kart and WipEout do so well is provide just enough interesting and important decisions along a player’s path to ensure they never become too overwhelmed with choices on one end of the spectrum, or too bored with a lack of them on the other.

So when developer Bizarre Creations creates a game that takes the action racing approach of Mario Kart and WipEout, complete with a range of powerful and explosive power-ups, mixes in the studio’s keen ability for creating realistic vehicles and tracks, includes a few new features and hooks of its own, and calls that game ‘Blur,’ what can go wrong?

Not much, evidently.

Instead of miniature karts and futuristic flying machines in Mario Kart and WipEout, however, in Blur we get real world racing machines from manufacturers like Ford, Renault, Volkswagen and Audi, and instead of Rainbow Road and tracks suspended kilometres above the ground, in Blur we’re racing around city streets, twisting highways and abandoned airfields in places like San Francisco, Tokyo and Barcelona.

There are still power-ups littered around the tracks, though, and plenty of them. Power-ups that boost your speed, shoot explosive charges, send out shockwaves, enable you to shoot down your opponents, shield you from harm, bring down electrical beams from the sky, drop mines and let you repair your damaged vehicle. What’s handy about Blur is that you can pick up three of these power-ups at a time (stylishly shown on the heads-up display on the back of your car), and each power-up has multiple uses with a simple backward or forward flick of the stick.

A speed boost power-up can just as easily be used to slow down time for a second, allowing you to adjust your position and then boost out of the bend, all in one seamless motion. Mines can be used as a short-range forward attack. Some offensive power-ups can be shot backwards, and others still can be used to destroy incoming attacks. All power-ups are very versatile, depending on the situation.

Naturally, the availability of these power-ups during a race comprising 20 competitors leads to events that are surreal in appearance. Simply speeding down a straight line with five cars ahead and behind you can result in a handful of somersaulting hunks of metal whizzing by, a half-dozen lightning beams appearing from nowhere ahead of you, white shields glowing in the distance, balls of explosive energy rocketing just over the nose of your own car, and multiple shards of expended ammunition lodging themselves into the track and competitors right next-to you.

When you’re in the thick of things, a ‘simple’ race in Blur can be intense, to say the least, requiring you to think incredibly fast and know just when to use which power-up you currently have in your arsenal.

When you’re not in the thick of things… well, that’s slightly different, but you’ll still be required to strategise and think ahead, with a few important decisions to make regarding which power-ups to use and keep, depending on your position in the race. Blur does suffer a bit from ‘Mario Kart syndrome’ in that you could be comfortably cruising at first place, but thanks to the use of a dastardly attack by an opponent, you all of a sudden find yourself many places down the race order, so it’s best to plan for the unexpected.

Progression in the singleplayer portion of Blur is dictated by how well you do in races (fancy that) and the winning of ‘Lights,’ awarded for race positions and completing certain objectives, which is where the ‘Fan’ (as in, fan of a band) currency comes in. Causing a certain amount of ruckus during a race will win you fans, and each race has a target amount of fans you need to get, which will award an extra Light. In addition, you can activate a series of ‘Fan Gates,’ and if you drive through every gate in the series, you’ll be given another Light.

A little later in the game, you’ll get to complete ‘Fan Demands,’ which, when picked up, require you to complete an objective within a certain amount of time (get to a certain speed, hit a certain amount of opponents with a particular weapon, etc.).

Lights are important. The amount of Lights you have will deem you worthy to move on to a new challenge, which comprises a set number of races and race modes, and at the end of a challenge, you’ll get to face off against an elite racer representing that challenge… only first you’ll have to complete all kinds of miscellaneous and arbitrary objectives to satisfy a list of requirements, before you unlock this face-off, which is where the first problem with the singleplayer portion of Blur comes in.

These lists can be extremely specific, and in some cases the objectives required to satisfy the lists are impossible to complete under certain race conditions, most notably when you’re first in a race (i.e. the point of taking part in that race to begin with). Some races may need to be run many multiple times in order to attain certain goals, and when Blur’s range of track content isn’t particularly wide to begin with, seeing the same race course and scenery over and over again while attempting to finish up a frustratingly precise (and in some cases, ambiguous) list of goals can become tiresome.

This all results in being forced to go against your own natural racing style and, dare I say it, skill. I found myself driving more slowly than usual and, if I was in first place, simply stopping in the middle of the track to wait for my competitors to catch up, so I could complete certain power-up based objectives. I shouldn’t really be punished for doing well.

I spoke a bit about interesting and important decisions before, and the need to balance decisions out over the course of a race so as not to overwhelm players, and Blur succeeds to a certain degree here, but definitely throws a lot at you with all of the power-ups to collect and manage, the 20 competitors, the variety of Fan Demands, and the Fan Gates, not to mention the fact that you need to deal with the challenge of navigating your way around a track the entire time, while dodging incoming attacks from other cars. It can all get a bit much in certain conditions.

Related to this, the difficulty ramp in Blur is a big concern. The first set of challenges does a good job of introducing you to the action, but after that you’ll be fighting just to place in a good finishing position, let alone in one of the required top three positions to earn Lights. A drop down to ‘Easy’ difficulty remedies this, but then it becomes too easy, while ‘Medium’ remains on the difficult side. It would be nice if this could be smoothened out in the future, perhaps in a patch of some kind.

This is where multiplayer comes in. You can play Blur against human opponents either in four-player split-screen, system-link or 20-player online, and the results (as expected) are a step above the singleplayer as far as satisfaction is concerned, as human players are obviously more adept at using on-the-fly strategies against you (and a little more susceptible to your strategies) than artificially intelligent racers. There are a few problems with online connectivity at the moment, but these issues will surely be ironed out in the near future.

Blur is an absolutely rock-solid action racing game, infused with the formula that makes the Mario Kart and WipEout series of games so fun to play, while adding its own ingredients to ensure players remain hooked and keep on progressing through the singleplayer campaign, before diving into the ‘real world’ of online and split-screen multiplayer. Everything is presented extremely impressively, while special mention must go to the excellent sound effects used to make you feel like you’re racing in a warzone.

Blur isn’t perfect though, and while the multiplayer portion of the game will keep players playing for a long time to come (although there are problems right now), the singleplayer mode has a few unfortunate kinks and flaws that slow it down. The game’s over-the-top action racing is, however, one of a kind and contains elements of strategy and depth gamers will continue to eke out for the foreseeable future.

As an arcade action racer, it’s best in class.

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