Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: RoadKill

Written by Matt Swider on January 16, 2004

Full Review: It's not as refined as it should be in terms of game polish and definitely not refined at all in terms of its maturity level, but RoadKill has taken the correct route in the evolution of car combat games.

It seems like everyone wants to ride with the big boys these days and Midway is no exception now that it has released RoadKill, a game that bluntly borrows from other hot-selling series such as Grand Theft Auto and Twisted Metal. The blend ultimately brings about an even more mature stuck-in-the-car combat game that involves going on jobs instead of simply facing opponents in an open area. To some, this will seem like a neat concept and a necessary evolution for the car combat genre while others will see it as a knock-off that's not worth playing. The drastic difference in opinion can be compared to actual roadkill and the way hicks will learn to love it, yuppies will leave it behind and parents won't want their kids touching any part of it.

RoadKill starts off on the right path in terms of containing an appropriate plotline. Even though it's been bashed by many for being bare-bones and done to death, you can't beat a post-plague story that stars survivor, drifter and driver Manson Strong along with his buddy Spike, who sits in the passenger seat to man the gun turret. The two ride through the game's three moderately-sized cities, each area in the midst of gang warfare, to obtain work that mostly involves missions where you are the wheelman as well as manager of primary and secondary weapons. Once in a while, Manson and the computer-controlled Spike switch seats, giving you control of the Halo-styled rotating gun-turret for warding off pursuing vehicles associated with rival gangs. It also gives the game some mission variety, even in the face of the array wheelman objectives that include destroying vehicles, sniping enemies, delivering packages, racing rivals and so on.

The length of the game's entire slate of missions lasts long enough to satisfy a short-term killing spree of a couple days and stays brief enough to keep from becoming completely repetitive. Of course, anyone willing to tinker deeper into RoadKill can take time out to cruise through and over many of the alleyways, the ramps and the rooftops towards hidden car and weapon parts, each unlockable after collecting the four segments and the required blueprint. While opening up new items is exciting, it's equally fun to actually finding ways of racing up rampways that result in obtaining the items, which reminds me of collecting keys in San Francisco Rush, though at least this latest game influence was published by Midway.

As you continue to take a break from the main portion of RoadKill and explore its environments in and out, you'll come across many sideshows that turn the mission mechanics into mini-games. These can include sniping individuals on rooftops, delivering a series of packages and racing others through a set of checkpoints like the missions themselves, but also initiate new goals such as keeping approaching suicide bombers at bay, surviving an onslaught of enemy vehicles, performing stunts across buildings or simply going on a kill spree for a record kill count. Unfortunately, these mini-games, like the missions, leave no way of restarting or opting out through the menu, so it's either inflicting your own suicide or waiting till time runs out to end the objective. However, the menu does provide a number of interesting stats such as game progress, longest and highest jumps and your kill count amongst the various gangs or smaller groups like shopkeepers, bums, prostitutes and even elderly people.

Providing detailed and devilish menu information is just one of the many signs that RoadKill comes with a sick sense of humor and takes the mature rating to the roof. The cut-scenes clearly overflow with foul jokes, point-blank violence and more cursing that actual quality. However, characters within many of the cut-scenes are something to be seen, especially your first employer that can only be described as a devil/freak/carnie with an Australian accent as well as the second boss, a military commander that takes advantage of the УDon't Ask, Don't TellФ policy even after the military's breakdown.

There's much more gay stereotyping and other types of racy humor on RoadKill's radio as well, another aspect lifted from Grand Theft Auto. There aren't as many stations to listen to, less programming to be heard and very little in the way of current chart-topping bands making you think that a majority of the world's DJs were effected by the plague. Still, there are also three talk radio stations, two of which provide much of the shock humor and one that's more informative about the weaponry than interesting. The somewhat-interesting love station hosted by a seemingly dumb-blonde and openly homosexual male easily brings about touchy sex topics with phone-in advice from listeners, but it's the channel of political banter that remains priceless. Not to be confused with the dad from the Nickelodeon's Rugrats cartoon, Stu Pickles is the one-man host of this station that is obviously influenced by Rush Limbaugh. His voice echoes behaviors that are so outlandish, you can't help but laugh at his ideas for killing off all of the homeless people and actions involving revealing the address of callers he doesn't agree with. Periodically, a news or weather bulletin will chime in with equally humorous as well as offensive material over all of the stations. Oddly enough, these bulletins somehow also Уinterrupt broadcastsФ even when the radio is set to Уoff.Ф

If you take any advice from Stu Pickles, it's probably going to be killing off a lot of people at random, which he says so casually it's almost like an accepted part of this new world of chaos and anarchy. Taking them down with firepower or simply running them down with your car really shows how the city can be brought to life. It leads to shootouts and eventually riots that can fill your car with bullet holes, fill your windshield with blood and fill the streets with a barrel full of bad words. But, you don't always have to be the one inspiring conflict in people to witness a realistic response. Many fights between rival gangs will break out among pedestrians on the sidewalk as well as drivers on the street, making it a sight to see from afar and somewhat frightening when caught in the crossfire. In addition to the city and gang warfare coming into existence, the level design brings more life to the game with suggestive storefronts and signs as well as less obtrusive scaleable structures like airplanes and parking garages, both of which act as ways to achieve excellent height to reach unlockable extras. The rest of RoadKill is dark and moody to fit its end of the world theme, the only big complaint being the lack of detail in some spots and the textures that appear muddy from a distance.

There is a bit of slowdown when action becomes too intense, but there's a good chance you won't live long enough to have that problem since you car is usually blown to bits before seeing such visual extremes. Likewise, seldom game glitches include people floating randomly and cars vanishing when out of the camera's focus. Again, it's rarely seen and is nothing that effects progress through the game, but stuff that should have been cleared up prior to RoadKill's release.

Something else that I would have liked to have seen is more depth in the multiplayer mode, which is limited to deathmatch. The inclusion of new game types would have worked well like team deathmatch, tag, capture the flag, keep away or even sentinel hunter in which one player starts a sentinel cop and runs into other vehicles in order to turn them into the same sentinel and in a sense add support to the police squad. Okay, it's exactly the same concept as the hunter game type from Midtown Madness 3, but what's another stolen idea going to do really do to RoadKill? Some odd-ball competition could have also been effectively ported from the main game's missions like keeping the suicide bombers at bay the longest, racing each other through checkpoints and sniping more enemies than your opponents.

Besides some new game types, things like computer-controlled bots would be on the top of that list primarily because unless you have four players participating, the gameplay is deader than roadkill after impact. Deathmatch is also darker than the rest of the game, provides less detail and contains smaller levels, leaving you wanting slightly larger arenas in addition to the more detailed smaller ones. Also taking a toll on this mode is the fact that the split-screen display in a four-player match makes viewing even more difficult. An online mode would have helped this problem to some degree as well as give the game lots of added value, but alas, nothing of the kind is to be found in RoadKill even though we already got a taste of it with Twisted Metal: Black Online for FREE! Granted the multiplayer capability is at least present and playable with four people of equal or an almost equivalent skill level, however, I can't help but feel the mode was tacked-on without much polish.