Ah System Rush. When it first arrived on the original N-Gage, it (along with Pathway to Glory) gave the platform just enough of a push to return it to respectability. A slick, fast futuristic racer, with the regulation weird plot to hold it all together. It was one of those ‘push the envelope’ titles that gaming systems love.
And now System Rush Evolution graces the new N-Gage Platform, and again it’s a mass of whiz bang graphics, slick presentation and lightning fast gameplay. If nothing else it looks impressive during a thirty second demo to your friends (which means that I see no reason why everyone shouldn’t be carrying the demo on their memory cards for those ‘ah but it’s just a phone’ discussions down the pub.
Setting aside the exciting plot of hacking into corporate computers and somehow evading the security programs in a co-vec (code vehicle), System Rush is a rather good futuristic racing game – a genre arguably started by F-Zero and Wipeout on the gaming consoles.
Evolution has made some changes when compared to the original, and these make it more suited to a mobile environment than previously. Rather than long flat racing tracks with inclines and banked corners, you are racing around inside a twisty tunnel, sometimes fully enclosed, sometimes parts of it missing - maybe it’s meant to be a wire, with the plastic sheath stripped away at certain points?
What this change of environment does is radically change the control system – whereas the original had your full ‘accelerate, brake and turn corners’, the new System Rush is more about positioning your Co-vec inside the wire, rather than navigating the wire. You follow the course of the wire no matter where you are on the inside of the wire. Left and right spins you around the wire, while up and down activate your power ups – one of which is a temporary speed boost. Otherwise everything runs on rails.
All you have to avoid are the obstacles inside the wire, the enemy co-vecs chasing you, and try to stay on the parts of the wire that are still sheathed, otherwise you’ll lose points and energy.
While this may sound silly and simple when compared to the complexities of console drving games, it really is all in the environment. I don’t mean the environment of the wires and obstacles in the game; I mean the environment you are playing the game on. A mobile phone. On an Nseries smartphone, you can’t have pixel perfect controls in a game like this – hence I suspect the move away from driving around the course and hitting the apexes of corners and then stomping on the power, towards more a high tech gunner with collision avoidance as a primary duty.
And you can forget about this being simple – the difficulty curve on System Rush Evolution is perfect for me; but as you may all recall, I’m a sucker for complicated games that provide a hardcore challenge, and that means I’m really enjoying having to really learn all the wires and courses in Evolution. You’ve got to hit the power-ups, you need to pass over the parts of the course that give you a short burst of acceleration, and you’ve got to miss all the obstacles. That’s a surprisingly welcome challenge, but for casual gamers who aren’t used to investing a lot of time to pass a single level, it may be just a little bit too much.
The single player ‘storyline’ mode shows the two main styles of game play: infiltrate and shutdown. See, this is where the hacking story helps, because these are essentially timed races – get round a number of laps of the wire in a fixed amount of time (usually barely enough), or shoot down enough enemy code with your auto-firing nose cannon before you run out of time.
And then there’s multiplayer. You have the same game options, plus the additional head to head mode where the power-ups can be used to affect your opponent – I love the ‘reverse their controls’ option just to mess with their heads. Finding a game can be a bit hit and miss. Searching for people who have a similar skill level to you (ranking search) finds you an online opponent in short order, but searching through the filter – where you can choose the track and type of game - is less successful. This may well improve as more people purchase the title, but for the moment be aware that the numbers of people playing are quite low.
System Rush Evolution sums up the new N-Gage platform perfectly. The gaming is perfectly suited for a mobile device, and offers a comparable challenge to console based gaming, thanks to the strong consideration of the devices the game will be played on. It’s fast and furious, and looks like a modern game, with speed, light and action all in abundance (and it looks gorgeous through the ‘TV Out’ on an N95). Yes it’s hard, but that makes it all the more rewarding.
Right now, as the games roll out, it will be perceived as the flagship title of N-Gage, although strictly speaking it’s probably one of the wingmen to some of the titles coming up in the next few months. That shouldn’t stop you seeking this out as soon as possible.
It’s Tetris, which if you don’t know (cue the usual comments about being from another planet) involves arranging falling blocks or “tetrominoes” into horizontal lines which makes them disappear.
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