Summer is here, and we’re between the big annual game release windows. The sunny months always are a good time for catching up on your backlog of games from the rest of the year or dipping into some fun diversions that won’t threaten to eat your life like a Skyrim might later in the year. That makes this a perfect time to play around with a fun and speedy racer, and that’s exactly what Jeremy McGrath’s Offroad delivers.
Jeremy McGrath’s Offroad arrived on the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network at the end of June and is a light racing game that bundles in some depth via RPG elements. This is actually the first McGrath-branded game I’ve played, even though Jeremy McGrath has been lending his name to video games since at least the late ‘90s. It’s safe to say that I know next to nothing about offroad racing, but I’ve done plenty of video game driving from GTA and Saints Row through Need for Speed and Burnout. When I fired up Offroad, I found my lack of knowledge and experience in the genre was pretty inconsequential. If you can hold down the right trigger and lean the thumbstick, you know most of what you need to know to enjoy this game.
There’s a perhaps unfair lowering of expectations that happens whenever I fire up a downloadable Arcade game for the first time. Perhaps I’m conditioned to expect that money correlates to quality, an obviously wrong notion that nevertheless asserts itself anytime I’m about to play a $10 game, as opposed to a $60 one. Jeremy McGrath’s Offroad is an example of a low cost game that delivers at least as much fun as many full retail games I’ve played over the past year. The visuals look fantastic, delivering full 1080p HD racing at 60 frames per second, and the landscapes and cars are colorful and fun to watch. There’s a great deal of polish and shine on this title that surpasses my expectations, and it would have been very easy to trick me into thinking this was a full retail title.
At the start of the game’s career mode, you’ll get a fairly simple offroad cart to race. There are three difficulty levels for the opponents’ AI, with the default setting leaving all the computer controlled racers in your dust. It’s very tempting to leave the difficulty set low, because you come through the first rounds of races feeling like an offroading god. Aside from providing a higher level of challenge, increasing the difficulty setting also will provide you with greater rewards, so you’ll eventually want to ramp up to something a little harder. As you race, you’ll accumulate experience points, and the XP flows faster in the harder difficulties than in the easier ones. Regardless of whether you’re playing on the lowest or highest setting, you’ll be loading up on experience points before you’ve finished even a few of the races.
XP comes to you for winning and placing in races, but you’re also rewarded for jumping, executing awesome turns, and various other mid-race activities. Once you’re finished, you can spend that XP to level up your current racing stats to perform even better in the next round. Some similar racing games provide upgrades in the form of various parts you can buy and replace on your vehicles, but Jeremy McGrath’s Offroad eschews the technicalities to go straight for the RPG-ish stat blocks. The game never makes you worry about specific gadgets and pieces, and that’s refreshing for this sort of streamlined racing experience. You’ll put your points into your acceleration, speed, handling, and braking, while you work your way through newly unlocked vehicles and an ever increasing set of levels.
There are a few different classes of vehicles you can race, ranging from rally cars up to pro buggies and pro lite trucks. The vehicles also sport official licenses, so you’ll see some familiar manufacturer names cropping up as you open up more and more options through your progression. There are quite a few unlockable tracks as well, rounding out at approximately thirty for the overall career mode. The tracks vary in challenge with their bends, curves, and hills, but the thing that really sets them apart from each other are their dynamic features. Falling rocks and destructible fences are just a couple of the sorts of hazards and surprises you’ll encounter as you blast around the dirt tracks.
As you work your way through the races, you have an ever present navigator who will audibly warn you about upcoming turns and directional changes. There’s also a minimap to help you sort out what’s coming up, but I found myself relying on the audio cues a lot more than I was glancing at the map. Voice plays a big part of the sound in the game, as Jeremy McGrath himself will be talking to you pretty much constantly whenever you’re not actively in a race. He pops up and will give you tips in loading screens, as you go into customization screens, and nearly everywhere else you’re not engaged in steering. It’s kind of neat to have the guy that involved in the game, but having him pop up constantly became a bit overbearing. Still, his tips proved useful, so I can’t knock the content.
Once you’ve exhausted the career mode and gotten your fill of leveling your vehicles, there’s an 8-player multiplayer mode included that lets you challenge your friends or strangers. That’s where the game’s replayability comes in, and if you have some buddies who’ve picked up the game you can spend some time knocking each other off the top of your friend leaderboards. There’s a surprising amount of good and fun content packed into this game, between the single player progression, the RPG leveling aspect, and the multiplayer races. It’s a fun pickup at just the right time of year for $9.99 (800 Microsoft Points), especially for anyone looking for a casual racing experience. Jeremy McGrath’s Offroad released on the PlayStation Network on June 26, 2012 and on the Xbox Live Arcade on June 27.
