However, while three different difficulties are on offer, even on the easiest settings, the single-player isn't as simple as you'd expect Pushing and shoving matches should be avoided as you always seem to come off worse, and winning can sometimes feel a bit random, like when a pool ball shoots out of the bottom of the screen, inadvertently propelling someone onto victory. Imaginative power-ups are liberally sprinkled around the level too - from our favourite, the carmounted hammers, to health boosts. The game consists of a variation of three basic modes races, timed challenges and battles (who can get to eight points first by destroying or beating their rivals). Winning levels rewards you with cars, of which there are 750 to collect but you can't choose any to use in races and they serve no real purpose other than to offend your eyes with their blocky design. Cars are crudely modelled with little to no detail, the lo-res textures show a lack of care in the conversion and the water texture looks so bad that we at first mistook it for a graphical glitch.
Despite using the engine from Supersonic's previous title Mashed, things somehow don't look as good as they did in that two-year-old title. Graphically, things aren't exactly up to scratch either. Old favourites like the pool table make a welcome return, but some levels such as the sewers and the museum feel especially lacking in terms of content and polish. Although Micro Machines v4 does offer a varied selection of tracks complete with their own tiny obstacles, most simply don't feel anywhere near as inventive and colourful as you'd expect from the series. The wildly inventive, small-scale tracks have always been a strong point of the series, with tracks offering the chance to race round kitchen surfaces and pool tables while avoiding obstacles that only a 4cm toy car would find problematic - salt spills, glue drops and pool balls. If you're a fan of the series, you'll instantly notice that the first thing to go missing is the cartoon-style character selection screen, replaced with, well nothing actually, as developers Supersonic have just done away with this entirely.Īnd so begins the long list of problems with the diminutive racer's latest outing. Packed with the same top-down racing, they may have thought that they'd stumbled across an old-school title ripe for updating, but as we've seen before, revisiting an old classic isn't always a clear-cut formula for success. Now, 15 years on from the original's release, Codemasters have released v4 of the series.
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Eventually appearing on 15 different platforms in seven different versions, the series was a huge success with its frantic racing, brilliantly conceived microenvironments and excellent multiplayer. Back In 1991 millions of Britons sang along to Bryan Adams' warbly ballad Everything I Do, clapped eyes upon Mr Blobby for the first time, walked around in what we then thought to be fashionable puffa jackets - and if you were lucky, tried out Codemasters' new top-down racer Micro Machines, based on the toy cars of the same name.