I don't mean it as a criticism when I say that this game is clearly inspired by Supercars II. I loved playing that on my Amiga and this has the same mechanics - top-down, cartoon handling, weapons and power-ups - and is fun (albeit, I haven't played this game for long enough yet to judge whether it's as much fun as SCII!) A great effort by the developers.
So, this is my initial impressions - I bought this game yesterday and have played it for about an hour so far. First the gotcha's... #1: when I tried to run the installer, I got an error that one of the parts couldn't be found. Long story short, I started my download from Gog.com *just as v1.0j was being posted*, so my first 2 parts were v1.0i, and subsequent parts were the newer version. The fix was simple, I just had to re-download the new parts 1& 2. I mention this in case it bites anyone else in the future. Gotcha #2: on my system at least, the game takes a few seconds to start, during which nothing appears to happen. Just wait 10 secs or so and it'll appear. Don't click the icon again because the game gets confused. My PC is an 11th Gen Intel Core i9, so not exactly low-end. Now the praise! This is a really good racing game, with a great selection of vehicles out of the box. Even a Reliant Regal 3-wheel van! The handling model is just the right balance of arcade/realistic, and I **love** that I can create local servers for LAN co-op play with my friends against bots. Not enough games do this - I've been stuck playing the likes of Age of Mythology and BF1942 for waaaay too long just for their co-op LAN play. I really, really don't want to play across the Internet against strangers. And to my amazement... this game includes maps from Carmageddon! Yep. The "Bleak City" and "Desert" maps from Carma1 are faithfully reproduced here (sans the blood and gore of that game), so you can incongruously race high-detail vehicles around a pixelated 90's map. It's fun! Honestly, I spent way too long just tooling around Bleak City in a combine harvester, chasing after a bot in a schoolbus - muhahahah! Short version: buy it. As others have said, GOG needs to have more AAA racing games and this one is WELL worth the money. Hats off to the developers!
I just bought this today, mostly based on the launch trailer and the description - I hadn't heard of it before. Firstly, the positive. It's a really charming game, with an endearing graphical style and a learning curve that is just about right. I grew up with the Monkey Island games, and this is - so far - a lot easier, but without feeling patronising or dumbed-down. The music and characterisation give it a distinct Studio Ghibli feel - definite shades of "Howl's Moving Castle" I think! The game auto-saves frequently, so no losing progress if you have to quit for any reason. On a less happy note, I think I've run into a bug in the game. I've posted a ticket in the community support forum, but given that this is such a new release I haven't been able to find any resolution. At a certain fairly early part in the game you get asked to solve a riddle. The answer is easy to find, but - for me at least - I cannot get the game UI to accept my response. So I'm stuck at that point, and have marked the game down by a star accordingly. I'm confident that one way or another my issue will get resolved soon, so I'm happy to recommend this game to anyone looking for a gentle, whimsical point-and-click adventure.
