ATV Offroad Fury Blazin’ Trails PSP review

Whenever a new games console comes out, I think we are all blinded by the power of it, and accept small flaws in the release games purely because they are a step up in some way. With the PSP, despite it not being the freshest chicken in the pen, I feel that my honeymoon period with it is still present.

The brilliance of having such a (relatively) powerful machine that we can take wherever we like, mixed with the wi-fi multiplayer potential makes my PSP, in my eyes, still a work of technical genius. The honeymoon tendency gives most game reviews a little boost in terms of ratings, whereas if the game had been released further down the line, it may appear a little less impressive.

In this review of ATV Offroad Fury Blazin’ Trails, I feel that I won’t be swayed by technology or innovation, but more by the absolute offroad fury that welcomes me every time I load the game into my PSP.

Blazin’ Trails basically gives you an All-Terrain-Vehicle and lets you traverse various levels to either finish through the checkpoints first (what many of us might call a race), collect markers within a specific time limit, and perform stunts in the vein of a number of skateboarding games. Different gametypes exist from championship where you unlock cards and various other goodies to use elsewhere to the standard single race when you’re just up for a quick go because of the … ahem… fantastic gameplay.

And that’s where it got the name.

Okay, the gloves are off. I really dislike this game. The titular fury is so apparent after just one race. The tutorial section, designed to slowly bring you into the game’s challenging dynamics are more like the only bit I really enjoyed, and only because I saw the potential in the game. It is far too difficult.

To get to a stage where you stand a decent chance of winning any single event would take an enormous amount of practise, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have bothered if I didn’t have to write this review. Sure, the racing seems alright, but when you can be driving perfectly up until the final lap, slightly over steer, scrape against an innocent looking wall and therefore go flying off your ATV only to be respawned in last place with no hope of victory, there is very little incentive to try again.

To fully understand the frustration and anger I was feeling at playing this game, you may consider how it would feel to be a rat in one of those experiments whereby an electric shock is administered every time the rat goes towards the wrong coloured door.

It didn’t take long for me to realise that every time I put this game into my PSP I was feeling a great amount of pain. If it weren’t for the fact that there may be a family audience here, I would swear blindly to try and get through to you, dear reader, the horrible steering (especially with the PSP’s analogue nub) and the gritting your teeth, Stella drinking anger that I have experienced while playing this game. Phew.

Let’s take a closer look

Graphically, it looks slightly better than okay. Good for the power of the PSP, and ignoring some (not so) occasional frame rate issues, I never really minded the presentation of the game. The sound is a mix of average effects and American teen rock styled music, with the highlights being Slipknot and apparently Good Charlotte make an auditory appearance, although I was too busy hating the game to notice.

While many of the components should have added up to something greater, it seems that even given above average graphical and audio features, simple mistakes such as the ridiculous difficulty (i.e. low time limits for collecting tokens) and stupid ease of which falling off your vehicle occurs hamper any possibility for fun gameplay.

Or does it?

There may be one saving grace. Multiplayer. There are a massive amount of multiplayer modes that you can try out in ad-hoc (PSP to PSP in the same room) or infrastructure (over the internet) mode, from a Hockey minigame to ‘Beach Tagger’ that lets you perform the highest scoring stunt on ramps to claim them, in an attempt to have the most at the end of the game. One problem, you’ll have to play through the single player championship to unlock most of them. And they were so close.

The benefit of multiplayer of course is that your opponent is likely to be just as hampered by the difficulty as you are. As for the main disadvantage; you’ll have to convince your friends to buy this too, and the chances are that if you are successful, they aren’t likely to be your friends for much longer.

I have been very careful not to judge this game too harshly. Having worked on the development side in the past, I am aware how some reviews can seem overly harsh or unappreciative of the work that has gone into the games themselves, but if not one person on the development team thought that simply removing the ability to fall off your machine would help gameplay, then I guess it has earned its name, for Fury is something that I will not be playing without a very good reason in the future.