Roadkill review

Roadkill is, to use horror movie cliché, the son of a thousand bastards. What you will have to come to terms with if you wish to spend any length of time with this game is the fact that it desperately wants to be violent and offensive. But not in an unsettling way, like Manhunt or with gleeful sarcasm, like Vice City.

This could have been a spectacular game if it had lived up to the moral desolation it promised. Sadly, within the very first cutscene, I was confronted with the most inappropriate profanity I could ever recall hearing in a videogame. It wasn’t that the language was offensive. It was just incomprehensible.

Bloody Hell

Real street gangs probably swear a lot, in a lawless post-apocalyptic future like the one depicted in Roadkill I’m sure that people would get run over with abandon. And other people would swear. It’s just that Roadkill expects you to run over old people and hookers and then gape at the screen saying, “****ing cool!”

This is the sort of violence alluded to on the covers of Iron Maiden LPs, just before we listen to the music and come to realise that men in lurid green tights shouting about the devil just aren’t scary.

But it’s “just a game” so we can deal with the absurd violence and the fact that the setting is nothing more than a joke. Which may even be the creators’ intention. But the fact that the joke doesn’t hold together too well is sadly indicative of the rest of the game.

Car Wreck

It is hard to argue against the fact that Roadkill has taken a very large leaf out of Grand Theft Auto’s book. You drive around a “living” city and undertake missions for crime bosses, taking time to uncover secrets and undertake side missions like courier jobs and finding hidden packages.

The difference is that you can’t leave your vehicle, but both your car and most of the others on the roads are armed with an upgradeable array of weapons.

Compared to other car combat offerings, the physics are less subtle and the AI is less than adept at times (especially when compared to the long-running Twisted Metal series). But the combination of large complex environments and a range of different missions make the gameplay quite entertaining.

How these missions tie together is a different matter. Everything from the music to the graphics seems either drab or inconsistent. Not bad, just inconsistent. For example some of the licensed music very accurately conveys the cheesy 80s metal aesthetic that seems apparent in some of the game’s design, but it gets padded out with sub-GTA style talk radio and some poorly conceived original music.

This all encourages you to see the missions as a series of fun, but unrelated diversions, with the vague plot acting purely as a mangled attempt to create atmosphere. This has the effect of making the game perfect to dip into for short periods of time, but slightly wearing after long sessions.

Wheels of Steel

Technically, Roadkill is quite well constructed, if unambitious in this post-Vice City era. Clipping is surprisingly tolerable and the frame rate never gets in the way of the gameplay. Even the ragdoll physics employed when you hit pedestrians are surprisingly enjoyable. Some of the environments, like the amusement park in the first area, are actually quite impressive. Although the amount of drab greys and browns underplay the effect of a lot of the level architecture, which is a shame.

The music can be pleasing at times, if you like licensed 80s rock and I’m sure that a lot of you do. Blue Oyster Cult make good driving music, but like many other things in this game, seem a little out of place.

Surprisingly (or not, given this genre’s heritage) there is a multiplayer component, although it is limited to deathmatch. It must be said that while Roadkill may actually be fun for a while with three or more players, two player battles are extremely monotonous and ultimately all of the combat comes down to attrition.

Screeching Halt

How much enjoyment Roadkill provides depends entirely on how much you want a solidly constructed gameworld. If people are only nameless ciphers to be shot and buildings only concrete slabs to be driven into at high speed while listening to something that sounds vaguely like AC/DC then Roadkill is probably your kind of celebrity car crash.