Split Second has a genius designer. This guy probably thought to himself: what could I create that has testosterone written all over it, but without muscular men grunting with every move they make or naked women that moan at every overly suggestive line they deliver. He figured it out: fast cars and big explosions.
Okay, Split Second didn't turn out a manly game, my girlfriend enjoys playing it as well, but it sure has that action-thing that most of us will enjoy. It's over-the-top spectacular with crashing planes, tumbling skyscrapers and derailing trains - all with loud and sparkling explosions.
In Split Second, the main idea consists out of racing and filling a power bar by drifting, drafting, jumping, avoiding danger or some combinations of those things. This power bar has three segments, and filling a segment allows the player to open up shortcuts but more importantly, it will allow you to trigger a 'power play' when a blue icon appears over an enemy.
A power play will blow the crap out of something in the environment. That's right, in Split Second, you never directly attack your enemy - you might blow up a bus parked alongside the road, collapse a building or drop explosive crates from a helicopter. This means you need to learn where power plays are, how effective they are and what figure out the optimal timing to take out your enemy.
When a player fills up all three segments, the real chaos begins. Where a single segment blows up a building, a full bar allows players to collapse skyscrapers, derail trains, sink boats or generally wreak havoc upon pretty much everyone unfortunate to be ahead of said player. These power plays have the added effect that they change the track with a permanent shortcut.
Combined, these mechanics allow for a bit more tactical play than for example, Blur or Mario Kart. Saving or using powerplays or shortcuts is crucial to victory and betting all on that last powerplay before the finish might prove fatal if the guy in front of you anticipates it. Choosing to use a full bar and change the route might take out a few opponents at a time, but it also removes three opportunities to wreck more opponents.
While this sounds pretty fun and all, Split/Second has some problems. My main gripe with the game is its artificial intelligence. The opponents in the game aren't terribly smart (they'll never trigger a large explosion when you're bound to be hit), but they make up for that by, what basically is, cheating. Their cars must come equipped with lightspeed engines because even with the fastest car in the game and when blowing up everyone thirty times over, they suddenly speed past you to disappear against the horizon. Not only is this highly frustrating, it also removes the feeling of accomplishment when winning a race. Instead of feeling I beat them, I had the feeling I just got lucky.
Another gripe I had with the game is its difficulty curve. Split/Second has an odd difficulty curve in which the first few 'episodes' are extremely easy, then halfway it becomes absurdly hard and by the end it's too easy again. It didn't really make sense to me, but it seemed to me that the opposition halfway kind of expected me to use the cars I got at the end and the difficulty didn't increase after that. Talking with others lead me to believe I might've been the only one to run into that, but it annoyed me enough to notice.
However, Split/Second makes up for those points with splitscreen and online multiplayer. Both of these are fun and explosive - and naturally fix the problems with both AI and difficulty curve. Personally, I'm a friends-on-couch type of gamer and the splitscreen is a mighty lot of fun. Nothing really beats blowing up a traffic control tower as the guy sitting next to you is driving under it.
Besides that, Split/Second features some very cool game modes. Besides the normal race, elimination and time trial modes (although in time trial everything explodes by itself), it has some unique modes. Survival is all about dodging gas barrels thrown from the back of a truck. Overtaking a truck earns you points, being hit will either slow you down (blue barrel) or wreck you (red barrel). Not being wrecked and overtaking trucks increases your multiplier and as such, you get some pretty frantic gameplay. Add a timer which when depleted turns all barrels red and you've got yourself a highly competitive mode for the splitscreen madness.
The other two modes are Air Strike and Air Revenge, the first being a dodge the incoming missiles game while racing the track, the second being exactly the same. In Air Revenge, however, you build up the power bar to deflect the missiles back at the chopper. Sounds different, plays exactly the same. Both are not available in splitscreen (a wise decision) as they're simply not that competitive (nor fun).
The car handling in the game is pretty okay. Drifts are easy to get into and with some practice you'll be sliding through corners with elegance (unless someone blows up that truck right there, in which case you'll be thrown from left to right and back again). While definitely not as accessible as Blur - its hard not to compare these two - it does add a bit of that feeling of torque to the game and that was something I sorely missed in Blur. Split/Second's arsenal of vehicles is purely fictional but rather complete: it offers sport- and muscle cars, jeeps and unlockable 'elite cars'. It's a bit odd that the descriptive lines of the cars are more indicative of their strengths and weaknesses than the statistics, but these lines are actually quite humurous so I'll forgive Black Rock that.
Split/Second has some great tracks in its soundtrack, high-paced tracks that intensify as the action gets crazier, the number of laps left decreases or your position in the race increases. The sound effects are pretty okay, although I must say the sound that plays after Sudden Death kicks in in Survival deserves a mention - it really pumps the tension up a notch.
Another honorable mention is for the interface. The menu, HUD and icons are amazingly well done. They're consistent, clear and pretty. Although the menu is littered with explosions and floating shards of glass, the HUD and icons are minimalistic and where possible woven into the action. You have to see it to believe it, but the lap and position indicators are positioned over the taillights of your car and that really works wonders in minimizing clutter.
But what really says it all is that I still play the game every now and then, even after I completed it with gold medals for every race available. I unlocked everything, achieved everything and tried everything - but it hasn't gotten old yet.
