So the Game Awards 2019 was an absolute waste of time to anyone who went there. What a great time to be alive. Can you believe they put a Fast & Furious game as the big announcement of that night above Wolf Among Us 2 or No More Heroes 3? So after being disappointed by Fast & Furious, I can disappoint myself again with a new Fast & Furious title, Fast & Furious: Showdown. I’ve never watched any of the movies, I have no idea what they are about, all I know is they were part of Game Awards 2019, so that’s justifiable reasons to hate it. Created by the lovely team at Activision, and Firebrand Games, who seem to excel at making mediocre games with cars, Fast & Furious: Showdown was the last game they ever made before going out of- Oh… Firebrand is still around. Huh, I wonder what reasons that are. Everyone behind this seems to be well off. Activision is still making bank, there’s a new Fast & Furious game and movie coming out… Maybe this won’t be the worst thing ever.
So the game starts off with these really gross character models, and with these awul subtitles. This is just a pet-peeve of mine, but I hate the kind of font they use with the subtitles. I get it’s part of Fast & Furious, but it just looks awful. So after an uncomfortably long loading screen, you make it to the game, and… it’s actually kinda fun, the first mission. You drive a car down the road, crashing into other cars and sending them flying into the air, causing as much destruction as possible. It’s nothing amazing, I find it weird how your little car can lift a semi-truck of the ground and the graphics are still ugly as sin, but this is already an improvement. Until I end up crashing because I hit a wall once. Then I get upset. Once you fail, you gotta restart the whole mission and the cutscene, and you can’t skip it. I tried hitting start, but it wouldn’t let me. But what it did do was cut out the voices when I unpaused. So you can’t let me skip a cutscene, but you can cut out the voices in said cutscene. You also get to flip cop cars into the air, and watching them fly is pretty cool… for about five seconds until the game slows down to show it to you, every single time. It’s fun on occasion, like how it slows down with each kill in Fallout or DMC5, but showing it every single time you take out a car just gets annoying. So the first level is fine. Not good, but passable. I even got an achievement. Remember achievements? Neither do I.
But when I get to the second level, that;s when it starts to get on my nerves. You have to carry a giant safe down the street as it causes destruction. A really fun idea, but bad execution. The safe can always swing back around and smash into you. Every time I came up with a new plan to avoid it, it always comes back and ends up hitting me into a wall and stopping my momentum. And that’s really bad, because stopping for a second will make the cops stop you. But watching the safe smash through the traffic as it glitches out of reality is pretty damn funny. And then we get to the race. You gotta make it to first. If you fall too far behind, your opponents are gone, long gone and it doesn’t help your in a dark location and can’t see the walls that end up fucking me over. I tried adjusting the brightness, but the game does not have a built in brightness setting, in a game from 2013! If this was in 2003, I’d understand, but this was on the 360. How can I defend this game when it keeps pulling shit like this?
So yeah, Fast & Furious Showdown is definitely a game that has a lot of technical hickups. And yet, it was still slightly enjoyable. It’s not a great game, but it’s not something I’d call the worst of Metacritic, definitely not worth a 22%. I’d say it’s more like a 48% or something. So yeah, this is definitely the best game I’ve played thus far. Not something I have much interest in coming back to, but it’s passable. Maybe Fast & Furious is something I should look into
So the game starts off with these really gross character models, and with these awul subtitles. This is just a pet-peeve of mine, but I hate the kind of font they use with the subtitles. I get it’s part of Fast & Furious, but it just looks awful. So after an uncomfortably long loading screen, you make it to the game, and… it’s actually kinda fun, the first mission. You drive a car down the road, crashing into other cars and sending them flying into the air, causing as much destruction as possible. It’s nothing amazing, I find it weird how your little car can lift a semi-truck of the ground and the graphics are still ugly as sin, but this is already an improvement. Until I end up crashing because I hit a wall once. Then I get upset. Once you fail, you gotta restart the whole mission and the cutscene, and you can’t skip it. I tried hitting start, but it wouldn’t let me. But what it did do was cut out the voices when I unpaused. So you can’t let me skip a cutscene, but you can cut out the voices in said cutscene. You also get to flip cop cars into the air, and watching them fly is pretty cool… for about five seconds until the game slows down to show it to you, every single time. It’s fun on occasion, like how it slows down with each kill in Fallout or DMC5, but showing it every single time you take out a car just gets annoying. So the first level is fine. Not good, but passable. I even got an achievement. Remember achievements? Neither do I.
But when I get to the second level, that;s when it starts to get on my nerves. You have to carry a giant safe down the street as it causes destruction. A really fun idea, but bad execution. The safe can always swing back around and smash into you. Every time I came up with a new plan to avoid it, it always comes back and ends up hitting me into a wall and stopping my momentum. And that’s really bad, because stopping for a second will make the cops stop you. But watching the safe smash through the traffic as it glitches out of reality is pretty damn funny. And then we get to the race. You gotta make it to first. If you fall too far behind, your opponents are gone, long gone and it doesn’t help your in a dark location and can’t see the walls that end up fucking me over. I tried adjusting the brightness, but the game does not have a built in brightness setting, in a game from 2013! If this was in 2003, I’d understand, but this was on the 360. How can I defend this game when it keeps pulling shit like this?
So yeah, Fast & Furious Showdown is definitely a game that has a lot of technical hickups. And yet, it was still slightly enjoyable. It’s not a great game, but it’s not something I’d call the worst of Metacritic, definitely not worth a 22%. I’d say it’s more like a 48% or something. So yeah, this is definitely the best game I’ve played thus far. Not something I have much interest in coming back to, but it’s passable. Maybe Fast & Furious is something I should look into