Reviews// Blur

This minor niggle is compounded by a couple of issues of its own design. For an arcade racing game, the ability to drift is quite temperamental indeed. There are specific cars that allow you to glide around corners at the turn of a wheel, sure, but for the most part drifting tends to offer no benefit to your chances of winning. It slows you down, and that's about it.

I'm aware Bizarre probably wanted to add some depth to the control mechanics, but with inconsistency like that it's almost as if the studio wasn't sure if it wanted Blur to be a pure arcade racer or simply a dumbed down Project Gotham. So it went for something in the middle. And the middle is a squishy sort of nothing, really.

It gets to the point where it's easier – and faster – for you to simply bounce off of the wall when you come to a corner and ricochet into the next straight. It's certainly cleaner to try and drift or brake around the bend but with overpowered cars, overly tight corners and the aggressive catch-up system to bear in mind, racing tactics tend to be limited to power-ups and not much else.

Blur works best when you're playing with real people, and it's in this mode where it succeeds – mostly. While you have your own progression bar and showroom unlocks for the single-player Career, for online multiplayer you get a separate one which rewards you with the same cars, mods and abilities for earning fans over a network connection. It adds a great deal of longevity and a fresh challenge too, as there are some online-specific features such as car awards to achieve too.

Playing online is extremely fun – when it works. My console froze in almost as many races as I participated in. It's not a good situation when you have to hard reset your console in the middle of a race and look like you've just rage-quit or something. I should point out that I have only played this game across the PlayStation Network before its official release, so this experience may be different for those who get the game after release or on another console. If it's a network issue, let's hope it gets resolved soon, as this is a bit of a selling point as far as I'm concerned.

Absolutely no complaints whatsoever about the local splitscreen multiplayer however – up to four racers can sit around a telly and engage in arcade action the old fashioned way, and it's as much fun as online matchmaking. Impressively, graphical fidelity has taken a minimal hit in four-player, but the action still blasts along at a speedy pace. You'll be able to play this in your living room without a sense of slowdown at all, and that's a good thing.

The final feature in Blur's online arsenal is in its social networking capability. If you have a Twitter or a Facebook account, you can link that up with your game and share your progression using these particular channels. At most points in the menu screen, pressing a trigger will ask you what kind of information you would like to share, followed by an outlet – Twitter, Facebook or the console's messaging system.

It's a nice idea, and if you have friends who seem to make a living sitting at a computer screen checking out status updates, it's an invaluable tool as well. Your mileage may vary though – for me, it's rather novel if anything else. I would have liked to have seen a bulletin board of some kind in the game's menu screen displaying a feed of random player's updates. That would have made Blur truly feel like a connected community. Instead, it seems like a one-way street.

Conclusion
Blur is a very entertaining game – its sheer bombastic style is compelling, and the gameplay is accessible enough to find yourself coming back to it every now and then. But for all the talk of a 'big boys racer,' track design isn't quite up to snuff and as a result you sometimes have to rely on 'pinballing' your way to the finish line. The power-ups, different modes and multiplayer options make playing Blur worthwhile, but its technical bugbears ensure you won't be playing it for long periods at a time.

SPOnG Score: 83%