GripShift (PSP)

 This is a review that doesn't feel good to write. The thing is, GripShift is a game with many admirable aspects: it's unique, it's full of innovative and interesting ideas, it feels good to control and move your character around, and so on. Unfortunately, a few negative aspects are so overpowering that they undo all of the above, and the game ends up being less than the sum of its parts as a result.

 

The game's concept is a pretty simple one, that I can't believe I haven't seen being done before or since (well, I guess Sonic R is pretty close, but not quite): it's a combination of 3D platformer and racing game. More specifically, your character is always in their car, and it always controls like a racing game, but while there are a few races, most of the stages in single player mode are 3D platform stages, complete with collectathon items and so on.

 

The stages are of the "islands floating in space" style, and you fail the stage if you fall off it. This is frustrating, but forgivable. Obviously, it's the kind of game, like say, Speed Power Gunbike (a game I love), that gets better the more you improve your skill at playing. The problem is that completing a stage isn't necesarily completing a stage. To explain, the aim in most stages is to figure out how to get to the exit, and then actually get to it before time runs out. If you manage to do this and also beat certain goal times, you'll also get a medal, and some credits. (You get credits for collecting all the stars in a stage, too.)

 

The bronze goal time is shorter than the stage's time limit, and the silver and gold goals shorter still. They really should have just had the bronze time as the time limit, though, as you get no credits unless you get at least a bronze medal, and you need a certain amount of credits to unlock more stages. The credit thresholds aren't low, either: after I'd played through the beginner stages, I had sixteen out of twenty-five credits needed to unlock the easy stages. At the end of the easy stages, I had fifty-two out of eighty-five needed to play the intermediate stages! Now, most of my non-review game-playing time is spent on arcade and arcade-style games, so I have no problem with score/time chasing, but to make it a mandatory part of progression like this is to turn it into an annoying chore. 

 

So that's it, then. GripShift is a game I wish I liked, and I wish I could recommend, just on principle. It's just a shame that all those good ideas are sunk by that one albatross of bad progression. Since this was published by Ubisoft, I'm going to be generous to the devs and assume it was the result of some suit-wearing moron deciding that they couldn't possibly release a short game and trust the players to enjoy it, they had to crowbar in hours of compulsory repetition.