Interstate ’76® The Arsenal

Bought this, and it is super buggy/glitchy. I do not want to invest time and become a wizard of patching, I just want all the mods to already be applied and just download it and play it. Shouldnt have to spend time fixing it before I can play it.

This was a very fun game back in the days, but unfortunately the game will not work properly on modern computers as it is sold here. So if you do not like downloading 3rd party patches and fixes I would not recommend buying this.

This game has some issues. The problem I ran in to is the whobbly wheels problem. This happens when a vehicle is in a cut scene then part of a mission. The car still has whobbly wheels and cannot drive fast. For certain missions this is game breaking. I looked online and found the solution was to limit my GPUs Framerate to 30FPS then it worked perfectly for me and there were no more issues. I used Nvidia Inspector for this, a third party program. Download at your own risk. Just know if you have whobbly wheels this is more than likely your solution. I wish GOG would just fix the game and limit frames per second themselves so I do not have to go into nvidia inspector every time I want to play the game and set my fps to 30 every time, but this is how it is.

I know this review will likely set me apart as the "odd man out" of Interstate '76's many fans, but I believe it is worth sharing as a counterpoint to some of the more glowing reviews this game has received over the years. Without a doubt, Interstate '76 is a fun game, especially at first, since vehicular combat games are few and far between - rarer still are retro alternative-history vehicular combat games set in a groovy fictional 1970's in which America has been crippled by the oil embargo and vehicular vigilantism becomes commonplace among the lawless areas of the United States. As far stories go, I found Interstate '76's tale of Groove Champion - the player's main character - the mystery behind his sister's death and his road trip adventures with his friend Taurus to be fun but hardly groundbreaking. The game set itself apart when it was first released because it contained all the trappings of a "lost" pilot to some never-before-aired 70's action show, like Dukes of Hazards meets Mad Max, coupled with retro-ish block figures in the game's cutscenes. However as the story progresses I found myself losing interest. The character of Groove Champion never grabbed me and I never quite cared for him. I never got a feel for his character arc and subsequently I lost interest in him. But I digress, for most who play this game will play it - not for the story necessarily - but for the game within. This too - in my opinion - is somewhat flawed. Through the dozen or so missions you'll face in the original campaign (disclosure: My review is explicitly aimed at the main campaign, I never played the expansion pack) the difficulty can vary wildly. At times you'll tear through a mission with ease. Other times you'll replay a mission dozens of times as you failed to meet an objective or missed a crucial jump off a ramp or simply took enormous amounts of damage from a lucky shot or two from other vehicles. Moreover, the game's single-player campaign is, in my view, somewhat lackluster. It is entirely linear and devoid of replayability. This seems particularly tragic in light of the fact that the game has a salvage system that allows you to rescue parts from burnt out enemy wrecks and place new weapons on your car. But in truth the salvage system feels tacked on - a holdover from the Mechwarrior series of games from Activision which, because of its non-linear gameplay utilized the salvage system much more aptly than Interstate '76 - and subsequently 90 percent of the time you'll end up with the exact same load out mission after mission with very few exceptions. Combat itself is fairly straight forward. Like air combat the ideal thing to do is to get on your enemies six (or tailpipe in this case) and lay into them with your cannons and missiles until they go boom. Sometimes they will swerve left or right to avoid fire in which case you need to anticipate. However, things get decidedly messier when you're on a 1 on 3 situation where you have one or two cars laying down fire into your flanks, which will quickly send you to reload the next screen. Really, once you have the strategy down you wash-rinse-repeat this until you're through the game. I never played this game multiplayer and so I cannot discuss that with any accuracy here. Overall, for $5.99 - Interstate '76 Arsenal Edition is not a bad value. It's a game you can play over a weekend or two and enjoy it for it's funky retro appeal (the soundtrack on this game is particularly awesome and worth listening to on its own). But I would caution GOG gamers who have never played Interstate '76 against the all-too-glowing praise that many will heap on it, it's one of those games - like the cars in a rear view mirror - may be closer (better) than they appear. Your mileage may vary. (Puns intended.)

This game has obviously not been given the usual QA treatment. I bought it, installed it and it just doesn't even load, it simply crashes back to your desktop. I'm so dissapointed as everybody recommended this classic.