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Review - Wipeout 2097Reviewed By: Kirk Hiner Review Date: July 30, 2002
Those who read my reviews with any degree of frequency often hear me speak fondly of days spent playing games on my Apple IIGS back in college. Although I mainly enjoyed Gnarly Golf, Manhunter: New York, and Pirates, there was one other to which I kept going back: Tunnels of Armageddon. T of A wasn't so much a racing game, but more of a speed game. The whole purpose was to navigate a complex system of tunnels as quickly as possible. If you made it out, the time left over was added to the time you'd get to complete the next tunnel. If you didn't make it, the world was destroyed. Racing in the future is much more...I don't know...urgent, I guess, than your NASCAR circuits nowadays. Anyway, I was horrible at the game, and must've been responsible for the world's destruction at least a few dozen times. I kept playing it, though, because it was so darn fast. The graphics were fairly simple, but they whizzed by at speeds I'd never seen before, and they looked cool doing it. I'm happy to say that I've experienced that sensation again with Freeverse's Wipeout 2097.
I'm not sure where Wipeout 2097 fits into the franchise...somewhere between Wipeout Creation and Wipeout Eternity, I assume. It has to be a pretty solid entry, though. It plays like a motorcycle chase scene in a Japanese cartoon, or the pod racing scene in Star Wars: Episode One - The Phantom Tollbooth. In fact, let's stick with that comparison for a moment. Stripped to its basics, Wipeout 2097 feels quite similar to Star Wars: Episode One - Racer. In both games, your vessel hovers slightly above the ground, making control a bit tricky at first, you're on a variety of tracks against a variety of other pilots utilizing a variety of ships, and you have to complete certain tracks well enough to open more tracks. The differences? Racer seems to focus more on the ship selection and customization. Wipeout, on the other hand, is all about the race itself. You can switch ships, but you can't outfit them with bigger engines, more powerful weapons, or a new paint job, and you can't smash Anakin Skywalker into a rock. That's too bad...killing young Anakin Skywalker should be a feature in every computer game, whether it be a Star Wars tie-in or not. Wipeout 2097 distinguishes itself on the track as well. You get weapons, first of all, that cause varying degrees of harm. Some can greatly damage your opponents ships, forcing them to get an energy boost in the pit track, while others simply slow them down. You pick up these weapons by flying over grids on the race track. Simple enough. The hard part is remembering which weapon does what. There are seven at your disposal, each indicated by a cryptic design in the top center of the screen. Learn these, for they are important. And remember, these weapons are going to be used against you as well.
Controlling the ships in Wipeout 2097 requires only a few keys, and it's supposed to support game pads as well, although I couldn't get the game to recognize my Macally iShock in either Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X. Perhaps if I could have, steering wouldn't have been such a problem. The different ships from which you can choose offer the typical racing game trade-offs...if you want more control, you'll have to sacrifice thrust or top speed. If you want aerodynamics, you may end up with less powerful shields. Which ship you choose depends upon your piloting style and upon the track. The tracks themselves, although not high in number, are big on style. With this sudden surge of older games seeing Macintosh releases, we're seeing a lot of games that look cool instead of "realistic" (they don't always go hand in hand, you know). I welcome this. It's much more important to me that games be fun to look at; quite often, that means looking cartoonish, looking like a game. Wipeout 2097, with its incredible speeds and sharply contrasting colors, offer some of the best visuals I've seen in a racing game. The audio, on the other hand, leaves a bit to be desired. The engine and weapon noises are unconvincing, and the soundtrack is a little too generic for my tastes. The tracks vary greatly in difficulty level. I managed to capture the gold on the easy tracks almost right away, but the step up to the medium difficulty tracks required a lot of practice and almost complete memorization of the courses (a map is offered before the race, but not during). And the hard tracks? Don't even get me started on the hard tracks. You can practice without the annoyance of other ships making you feel about as fast as a three toed sloth. Time Trial mode allows you to race against the clock only, as if that weren't already difficult enough. Once you've got that down, head back to Arcade Mode to take on the other pilots and grab the gold. You can play this mode without weapons, by the way, if they seem to hinder you more than help.
There's a multiplayer component as well, although it's not as robust as it should have been. You should have been able to race against seven or so human components online. You should have been able to find entire communities of racers engaging in full tournaments for cash prizes and the chance to get your picture taken with a Race Queen or two. Instead you're stuck racing just one other opponent over a LAN. At least, that's the best I could do. The instruction manual claimed otherwise, but Freeverse's own website seems to disagree. Another complaint I have is with the interface, which reeks of the clunky PlayStation screens. This is expected, of course, since the game is a PlayStation port. Just because I expect it, however, doesn't mean I have to be happy about it. There are some other nice features sprinkled throughout Wipeout 2097, and there some more annoyances as well. In the end, however, it's all about the race. Wipeout 2097 is sure to keep you entertained for a while. You'd better get very good very quickly, however, or you're likely to become frustrated and/or bored with the game before you can get to the really good stuff. And hey, speaking of good stuff, in the opening dialogue box, set the frame rate to "Fastest Rate." If you've got a fairly modern computer, you're in for a wild race. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go destroy the world again in Tunnels of Armageddon. I mean, what's the point in losing a race if it doesn't bring about the end of humanity?
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The Wipeout franchise has become quite popular on the Sony PlayStation. People love to race things, after all, although I couldn't begin to tell you why. If it has wheels and more than one was made, somebody's going to want to make it go faster than the next guy. In Wipeout 2097, however, there are no wheels. In fact, there's not even any gravity. Well, not as much as we have here on Earth, anyway...the Earth I destroyed!
Quite often, you won't want to fly over the weapon grid because sitting next to it will be a speed grid. These provide brief power surges that can quickly propel you past your opponents. They can also quickly propel you into walls, which is a problem I had with the game. In Wipeout 2097, the tracks are too narrow. In some of the more challenging tracks, even after hours of practice, I still found it extremely difficult to take some turns without scraping the walls. Luckily, scraping the walls and slamming into them are two very different things.
And finally, once you've won the gold in all six Arcade courses, you get to advance to Arcade Challenge where the action really takes place. Here, weapons are mandatory. So is performance. Finish in fourth place or lower three times, and you're done. Finish in first, and you can advance to the next track, which here is selected automatically.