S.C.A.R.S (Playstation)

That title there's an acronym, for Super Computer Animal Racing Simulation. The plot involes a super computer in the distant future simulating races between animal/car hybrids (reminiscent of the 90s toyline Car-Nivores) for some reason. The plot doesn't really affect the game in any way other than each track having a little sequence where the topology "grows" out of a flat blue grid, before the textures spread over it. That's pretty cool, though. Better than a normal loading screen, at least. The cars being animals doesn't really come into it at all, though, other than looking cool and putting an A in the title's acronym.

The races themselves play out in a Mario Kart style, which you might not expect from the non-cuteness of the overall aesthetic. There's power-ups to collect and a jump button, though, so that's pretty Mario Kart, I'm sure you agree. There's enough differences in the formula to set it apart, though, and they mostly involve the power-ups themselves. Firstly, they aren't assigned randomly, you can see which power-up you're going to get before you get it. This means there's none of the MK-style balancing where racers at the front only get the worst power-ups, and racers at the back only get the best. This is kind of balanced out by the fact that most of the power-ups are more useful when you're behind the pack, so a racer in first will be driving around holding onto their power-ups just in case they fall behind at some point.

Then there's the power-ups themselves. There are some of the usual suspects: missiles, speed boosts, shields, and so on, but there's also several kinds of trap power-ups. When used, these typically send forwards an energy field of some kind: a wall, a spinning triangle, a floating magnetic tetrahedron. The wall and the triangle simple stop any car that hits them, and they take a split-second to disappear afterwards, so if a few cars are bunched together, they might all get stopped, fot you to drive past with impunity. The magnetic tetrahedron is more deadly, but only to one car: it piicks them up and spins them for a few seconds. The trapped car can shoot a missile to get free, but they'll be dropped at whatever angle the magnet currently has them at, while if they wait the few seconds to be dropped naturally, they'll be pointed in the right direction. What's annoying about all of the above, is that they can trap the racer who sent them out, which seems like a stupid oversight.

Another weird quirk is that you have a score while racing, with points awarded for hitting your opponents with weapons. But these points don't affect your standing in the race ranking in any way, and it's hard to see what the point of them is. There's a bonus ranking point awarded after each race for the racer that had the fastest single lap, so why couldn't they have had another one for the highest score? As it is, the score doesn't take anything away from the game, but at the same time, it doesn't add anything either.

As a single-player experience, SCARS is very much okay. It's not great, but it's not bad, either. In terms of Playstation kart racers that I've played in recent times, it's better than Tank Racer, but not as good as Megaman Battle & Chase. It's probably better with human opponents, but that's obviously going to be the case for the other games, too.