It’s no secret that the racing/driving genre has been in need of a good strong dose of innovation for a few years now, so when a game comes along that claims to have mixed puzzle games, platform games and racing games ‘ you have to sit up and take notice. That’s exactly what Ubisoft’s GripShift claims, and for the larger part ‘ gets it right.
Taking control of a standard cartoonish buggy, you must jump, powerslide and nitro your way around a plethora of different puzzle-based courses. Success in the game depends on whether or not you complete the various goals on offer, which include completing the course within a set time limit, collecting all of the stars on a level, or defeating the opposing racer in a straight out battle to the finish line. Thankfully, you don’t have to do everything in one run, so you can concentrate on one thing at a time, then go back to complete the other challenges later.
Fans and jump-pads will launch your car into the air to negotiate some tricky gaps or get you up to higher levels, and the game almost turns into a flight simulator when this happens. Nitrous will power you along through the air faster, whilst pitch and yaw are controlled by the stick. Your apparently magic brakes will also slow the car in the air, leading to the possibility of some very skilled flights and landings. Later levels rely on this a little too heavily, I feel, and you’ll be in the air more than you’re on the ground in the latter stages.
Graphically, GripShift isn’t the greatest use of the PSP’s hardware that we’ve seen. Most of the levels take place in the air, on floating platforms ‘ much in the same way that Super Monkey Ball was portrayed. Indeed, falling off these levels grants another nod to the simian-in-a-sphere-’em-up, and you’ll be seeing the ‘Fall Out’ message more often than you care to mention. Surfaces are solid, there’s no slowdown or pop-up to speak of and things move along at a fair rate. If there are any shots to be fired at the game’s engine, it would be to criticise the camera. When you’re sitting on a high platform with less than thirty seconds to go, there’s no way of pointing the camera downwards so that you can see your target destination. The only answer to this is to hit the accelerator and hope. If you fail, you can always just restart the level. This takes a great deal of skill out of GripShift ‘ and it’s a tactic that’s required far too often for my liking.
As a description of the PSP’s ideal game, GripShift’s stop-start action sounds like heaven. Take your PSP out of your pocket, fire it up, play a couple of levels and power it down again. This only works if you keep your PSP on constant standby, however, as the five or six developer/publisher/developer’s friend logos that show up before the main menu loads will hamper your progress.
