| GripShift review |
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Put a monkey behind the wheel of a car, dangle bananas at regularly and enticingly placed intervals along the street and you can fair guarantee within five minutes (if the wretched, rutting thing stops picking its fundament and can figure out how to start the engine) you’ll be rewarded with four-score-and-twain corpses in various states of mutilation. Monkey want banana, monkey kill!
Subtract the gruesome tally of the dead, insert into a gaming scenario and you have GripShift. The echo of Sega’s simians resounds strongly here, and if flattery is the sincerest form of imitation, GripShift is downright earnest.
True, one might presuppose, from the crazed loops and ramps of the tracks on display, that this owes more to Stunt Car Racer (by way of Trackmania) but the demanding and (indeed, on many tracks) intricately slooowwww mechanics make this more of a Super Monkey Ball with wheels rather than, er, balls.
There’s a smattering of fairly uninspired and objectionable “gnarly” characters and choons, the front-end resembling every other Generation X snowboarding dooood-oriented, design-by-committee abomination that’s ever been burped into the world, but get past this cynical template and you’re greeted with a fairly agreeable, derivative approximation of SMB on the PSP, with added (well, more emphatic) collectathon/reward elements.
Essentially, the player progresses through sets of stages ranked by level of difficulty (Easy, Intermediate etc… sound familiar?), unlocking the next set by amassing credits, accrued by winning medals based on completion time, the collection of coins and bonus (GS) markers. There are a few fast-paced racing stages, where the player is pitted against an AI opponent, but the majority of the courses are of the incredibly fiddly, thin-and-wobbly kind, meaning beating them is often an exercise in slow and steady progression rather than belting through loop-the-loops with nitrous in full blazing flow (although, of course, this is also present).
Minigames, too, are unlockable, including such de rigueur fancies as Monkey *cough* Penguin Bowling (barrel your vehicle into said stupid, flightless birds, even though GripShift’s penguins seem to be capable of limited flight instead of having the good grace to DIE!) and stunt (playground) stadiums chockablock with eye-gougingly inaccessible coins to collect. Violence will no doubt befall those unlucky enough to be standing nearby when your car Falls Out (complete with suspiciously familiar death scream – at least the game doesn’t inflict it on you thrice from varying angles) of the arena at the 98/100 coins stage.
Control of the cars (or, more accurately, hot rods, which are customisable with a whole host of foul, flaming skull decals, paintjobs and the like) is fairly intuitive though their concomitant physics are a touch cumbersome, the game allowing mid-air aftertouch, braking and plentiful boosting with nitrous, all of which are necessary to access obscurely located bonus tokens (the game liberally sprinkles bounce pads around too, so aerodynamic control is essential considering much of the time is spent high in the atmosphere). The analogue nub is definitively useless, the clicky D-pad the only real choice of input. Unlike the portable iterations of SMB, digital control is not too horrific in practice, muchos frantic tapping become second nature in keeping your vehicle on slippy slaloms.
The inclusion of a fully featured track editor is extremely noteworthy, and it is this that is likely to provide the title with longevity. Extra tracks are already available for download (admittedly mostly for the US version of the game) and putting together a reasonably complex example is easy to accomplish and quite rewarding. Ad-hoc and WLAN multiplay is also provided, with the ability to share custom tracks.
A notable aspect of GripShift’s release is that it’s the first budget title (at least in the UK) to hit the PSP’s lavishly expensive shelves. When the RRP of new games seems to be stealthily and egregiously creeping up the wrong side of £35, it’s refreshing to see an accomplished and reasonably polished title being made available for sub-£20 RRP – hunt around online and prices obviously get even cheaper. Kudos to Ubisoft for starting this pleasant trend and hopefully it won’t be a short-lived one.
Approach GripShift with realistic expectations, and a pleasant, if not revelatory, experience will be forthcoming. True, the title palls and frustrates on extended play but of brief spurts of fizzy gaming on the hop, GripShift is eminently capable. Factor in the value for money that this title provides (the inclusion of the track editor being a real boon) and there are far worse ways to dispose of twenty English pounds – buying a skip-load of bananas and trying to tempt monkeys into vehicular homicide being high on the list.
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System: Sony PlayStation Portable
Genre: Puzzle
Developer: Sidhe
Publisher: Ubisoft
Players: 1-4
Version: European
Reviewed: Dec 2005
Writer: Bill Fuller
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Pros:
- Extremely good value for money
- An adept puzzle game in vehicular shoes
- Track editor is a veritable bonus
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Cons:
- Handling is tricky in straight racing
- You will die. A lot.
- Frontend is fairly offensive (though unobtrusive)
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