Imagine every great chase scene from the movies - Ronin, The Italian Job & The Bourne Identity immediately spring to mind. Now take that frenetic action and place it in the context of staged races for a television audience. Add in explosions and edge of your seat action and you have Split/Second: Velocity in a nutshell.
Rather than straight up races to the finish or shunting your opponents off the track, Split/Second gives you the power to take out your opponents with devastating environmental attacks. The game plays out as a reality TV show, with tracks that have been loaded with explosive barrels, landslides and other obstacles to keep the audience entertained and provide the contenders with a means to get past their opponents. To utilize the different attacks on offer, racers need to build up a series of power bars by drifting, getting air from jumps or drafting behind opponents. One or two bars allows you to detonate obstacles ahead of your vehicle, while fulling up all three bars allows you to trigger a powerplay that changes the track, usually by triggering a huge explosion that destroys part of the route.
Powerplays have different levels, with more powerful levels requiring more time to build up. Use it too early and you'll lose out on a more devastating attack. It makes for some fantastic multiplayer racing as you and your friends battle it out with frequent explosions, takedowns and other hazards constantly changing the leaderboard; there's no better feeling than winning a race on the last lap by smashing your friends out of the race with the aid of a collapsing building. It’s this aspect of Split/Second that makes it one of the best online action racers since Burnout Paradise. The only downside is a rather cumbersome party up system in Xbox LIVE matchmaking. Hopefully it's something that can be resolved in a future patch.
Before you venture online though, it's best you give the single-player mode a go. Dealt up into 12 episodes, and comprising of several races in each episode, players race to earn credits to unlock more races and vehicles. It’s a simple formula but it’s perfectly balanced thanks to the many different race modes on offer. For example, you'll come across detonator events, which equates to a time trial with automatically triggered powerplays, air strike events, where you must dodge a helicopter firing missiles at you, and even a mode which pits you against a load of trucks who just happen to drop barrels which can either slow you down or even damage your car. The constantly changing challenges means that the single-player mode at no point becomes stale or overstays its welcome. The AI racers are also no pushovers, and while they might not have the evil streak of a close friend destroying you mere metres from the finishing line, they’ll still present you with a tough challenge in all the races. The AI does make use of rubber-banding (i.e. The AI will catch up to you, even if you're miles ahead) which results in artificially tougher races, but it never becomes frustratingly unfair because of it.
Every race is accompanied by a pulsing track that kept reminding me of the best moments from the James Bond movies as Bond races through the narrow streets of some exotic European town with enemies hot on his tail. The track and scenery also flashes by at an impressive rate, with the cars having a sense of power and speed. Even more impressive is that this sensation of speed doesn’t suffer in the slightest online, with races having minimal traces of lag at worst.
Arcade racing games are nothing new, with Criterion’s Burnout series having lead the pack over the last few years. It's been a hard act to follow, with many games failing to live up to Burnout's simple yet addictive action packed gameplay. Split/Second: Velocity, however, manages to not only bring something fresh and exciting to the genre, but also gives us all the action packed racing we can handle. Having put in 60+ hours into Burnout Paradise I can say that I’ve finally found the successor to Criterion’s magnum opus.
Pros:
- Fantastic multiplayer
- Well paced single-player
- Excellent sensation of speed
Cons:
- Party-up system is cumbersome
Rating: 
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