MotorHEAT and why you need to bum it senseless.

This didn't make the cut at PEOWW as we're not ready to open up to the madness of XNA.

MotorHEAT (Xbox Live Indie - 240M$P)

Yes, it's an Indie game and yes, it's 240M$P which is three times what I'd normally pay for anything without achievements in it but, now that we've got the negatives out of the way, let's discuss the sheer brilliance of MotorHEAT, the latest offering from Spanish indie-scenesters, Milkstone. As with most Indie games, the premise here is very simple. You need to drive from point A to as far as your skills can take you along an endless track packed full of other drivers. This isn’t a racing game though but rather an old-school avoid-‘em-up with a huge emphasis on risk vs reward gameplay.

MotorHEAT’s simple premise is matched by an equally simple front-end which offers entry into the game’s single gameplay mode, a few options, car customisation (just a colours and pre-set patterns) and a look at the online leaderboards. I’d advise picking bright colours for you motor as this game does have a day/night cycle and when you’re driving at night you’ll need all the help you can get. Especially when your eyes begin to melt.

Oh don't look back. Don't look behind you. Reckless driving on the dirty back road.

Once into the game things start to get good. The graphics are reasonable – it is 3D rather than the expected top-down indie shite you normally get – but everything moves at staggeringly fast speeds. The mix of pace and detail echoes the early Burnout games but after a while you’ll stop seeing details and will be zeroing in on the first sight of traffic. Sound on the other hand is the usual extreme sports, generic riffery that tends to plague both Indie and XBLA titles. It’s harmless enough but you’ll probably enjoy the game more if you get your own custom soundtracks happening.

The gameplay is simplicity itself. As you speed along the road, your only tasks are to avoid oncoming traffic while trying to snag the odd power-up. The road careers left and right over hills but you don’t need to worry about steering – you’ll follow the road automatically - you just concentrate on changing lanes and applying turbo boost. This is effectively a race against time so you’ll want to boost wherever possible while making sure to not go all Marc Bolan, which is a definite possibility given that the game has no brake button.

The game ends when you run out of time. You start with a minute on the clock and gain thirty seconds every time you reach a checkpoint. You’ll need to boost a fair bit if you want to break even though and crashing will cost you ten seconds. It’ll also knock out your multiplier which counts up as you go along. A healthy multiplier is obviously the key to getting highscores but you need to balance protecting it with making it to the next checkpoint. Risk vs reward is the cornerstone of this whole game.

In a street machine of ste-el!

To help you out, there are power-ups on the road that offer various helping hands. Yellow ones add half a million points to your total, blue ones add ten seconds (effectively cancelling out your next crash), greens max out your boost meter, purple temporarily increases your multiplier and red makes you invulnerable for a short time). You may occasionally mistake a car for a power-up or vice-versa but it'll be your fault and you'll kick yourself for it.

You see, that's the great thing about MotorHEAT. It's always your fault. However, if you can hold your shit together long enough, maybe you'll start troubling the upper reaches of the leaderboards. Unlike many XBLIG titles, this does have full online leaderboard support and currently four of us at PEOWW are vying it out to be top dog on our own friends leaderboard. To make things even more competitive, you can see your global ranking increase in realtime. It'll even tell you how many points away from the next one you are. That said, looking at the HUD for even a split-second invariably equals the Princess Diana Experience.

I can't fellate this game enough so don't consider this an official review. I'm going completely fanboy over this addictive bastard of a game but it is exciting, compulsive and fun which is more than I can say for most games twenty times the price of it. Get on it and start posting scores. It's the law.