Could you imagine yourself rolling down the street sat inside a $50,000 piece of metal, turning heads and feeling like you’re the man? With your income? Me either!
So, instead, I gave a shot to playing a videogame where you can drive one of the most highly regarded cars available: the Corvette.
Corvettes are hot cars, so you would expect a hot game to go along with the title. Corvettes are supposed to be fun, sexy, loud, and fast. But, with the game version, you’re left with an experience that doesn’t fulfill any of your heart’s desires. Of course, like most games, developers Steel Monkey have messed up, and they’ve messed up bad. Instead of Corvette being a highly polished and fun game that’s easy on the eye, they’ve rendered it to the point where you feel as though you’re playing ‘Volkswagen’ rather than ‘Corvette’. Repetitive gameplay and so-so graphics equal out to make Corvette little more than an NFS: Underground mimic…that failed.
Games these days are either good or bad, there’s seldom a middle ground. Corvette falls firmly into the bad category. Every aspect of the game has been tried before. Ever nuance is just like the next: normal, nothing special yet it’s not horrid. Just dull.
Quite honestly, the gameplay is poor. Every car within the game is a Corvette, perhaps predictably. Some date back to when they first began rolling off the production lines, all the way through to the most modern ones, almost every existing Corvette model has been programmed for play. As far as customizing goes–there isn’t much. The more you race and win, the more upgrade items become available for your ‘bad boy’. Looks and performance won’t receive much toning from when you first start out. To distinguish your car from the other Corvette models, you have the option to change the car’s color; multi toning the Corvette in red, blue, yellow, and so forth, or whatever’s to your liking.
Graphically, Corvette falls short by a foot. While the color of your Corvette is squeaky clean and full of gloss, the backgrounds are quite a different subject; trees and buildings could certainly have benefitted from a little more time in the works. They often have a blocky resemblance that can become rather nerve racking. However, car models are accurate and wouldn’t look out of place if it were possible to put them side by side with their real counterparts.
There are a few game modes to play. Each one pits you in 5 on 5 action against other Corvettes to see who’s the head honcho of the pack. Quick races are as they suggest; instead of competing for a prize, you can use this mode to practice your rusty skills, which will help before you get to the real races. Multiplayer mode is used to go online (or against a friend on the Xbox) via Xbox Live. Playing online can occasionally cause slow down on the connection and even have some crashes on the Xbox. Arcade mode is strictly for fun racing, or even for a wee bit more of a challenge. The major problem with all of the modes is that they don’t introduce any new excitement to the experience. The levels are dangerously linear and all of them appear similar; the same tracks for every mode, with the exception that they may be played in a mirrored format. What is really sad is that there aren’t any special effects in the gameplay itself, like copters plunging from the sky or buildings falling…this would have been an improvement. (Irony, yes?: Editor)
The worst factor of Corvette would definitely have to be the preposterous handling. Even on the driest of streets you’ll still manage to slip off line and lose control. Managing to time your turns is the game’s biggest challenge, and it’s not fixed with a few minutes of practice, either. To be exact, I myself…I know, I know, I’m good at everything…(Humor, yes?: Editor) couldn’t get a handle on things. More than a few times I ran into walls or careened into other players. AI is yet another poor aspect of the game. Opposing cars have no sense of tactical direction; instead of taking a shorter path (a corner’s apex) they often go on a longer route and hit you, it’s truly sad.
It’s awful that this review has nothing but negative comments but, quite frankly, there isn’t much that’s note worthy. From gameplay to graphics, it’s all a major disappointment. The best feature of Corvette would have to be the lame graphics. I simply can’t recommend Corvette–even to the die-hard fans, because they could be using their $30 to gas up a real Corvette.
Game modes become repetitive way too fast, in part due to the shortage of racing circuits. What does actually spruce the gameplay is that on certain tracks you race with traffic coming at you as well as following you. Even with that said, Corvette’s a bad game that should never be played.
