Another great innovation from the studio that brought us "PURE" Here's the product link for it >. PURE (XBOX 360) . What an absolutely magnificent marriage between "Black Rock Studios" and "Disney". After playing and being hooked on the DEMO of "Split / Second" (Here's the XBOX 360 product link for it >. Split / Second),I Immediately played the full version of the game and was once again instantly hooked and even more so seeing the full version in action for myself. I do believe some critics were a little unreasonable on judging this game because the media is a little too up tight and bent on extremely serious, long and drawn out simulation racers in this current era in time of gaming.

However I did take the time to evaluate the game fully for myself instead of just taking everyone's word for it. I know my own taste in games and my own limit of what I will or will not tolerate in them. Therefore if a trailer to a game catches my attention, I'm usually more than willing to try it's DEMO out first without critiquing the graphics, seeing as the graphics don't make up for a great concept in game-play. They're just a healthy way of presenting the game in question. Thus "Presentation will never make up for demonstration" and vice verse. A game developer/publisher must provide a healthy medium between both presentation and demonstration in order to make their mark on the gamers through out the history of this great sector of the entertainment industry. Of course we the gamers must be personal responsible to first be self aware of our own preference in gaming, then give ourselves a fair chance at evaluating the game being introduced to us. That's usually the general idea of how things should work within this industry.

Well. My peace has been spoken and I truly do appreciate what developers/publishers like "Black Rock Studios" and "Disney" are doing these days to revive a somewhat dying genre in gaming and ultimately their shear consideration for the gamers out there from all walks of life. I indubitably do recommend this game to anyone who is very nostalgic, open-minded and just want to have or share some clean wholesome fun ! :)

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This game, as a previous reviewer had stated, is simulator quality with the playability of an arcade hit. The fact that you can manipulate track layout with the "Power Play" system adds a whole new dimension. There are a multitude of track variants with some being quite nerve wracking with planes crashing and towers falling down throwing your car all over the track. Some areas appear to have compound mutations where you could use power plays to manipulate a track section more than once re-recreating an environment broadening the scope of the game tremendously.

Lighting, environmental elements, and particle systems come together with a solid focus producing a professionally polished platform title that can be quite expansive; coupled with the fact that the game can be played over a network connection says allot but also, throw in the fact that there are already un-lockable vehicles of varying types being released by various retailers. This all screams depth of play. You're able to enjoy some quality "me time" doing the "Tour de Excessive Force" then go online to show off your newly unlocked or easter egg ride with a lesson in how to manage "Public Relations" via an accurately delivered pyro-technique air parcel -- you get to have your cake and eat it too or, help someone else eat it.

This is an excellent example where a perfect balance between complexity and mechanics was struck with a focus applied by a planning and management team delivering a game that provides for its audience and not a marketer's box card. The developers are quite well known for their previous works in the "racing" genre and backed by Disney they had allot by way of creative influences and freedom as well as fat funding for their little, big budget opus. This is a street racing game that knows itself and maintains a focus on what it is letting the player submerse themselves and not wind up a public software beta tester, debugger, or game forums moderator discussing glitches. They smoothed the game out very well and it all coils up into a professionally managed commercial project/product.

There is absolutely no trade off in this game, that I've seen, other than shouldn't you be mowing the lawn; all after that, the grass will be there tomorrow -- where's it going?

It runs very well on my NVidia GeForce 9600GT with global lighting, particles, caustics, and depth of field of a high quality right from the start.

I like it allot...

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I recently purchased a video game Split Second from the merchant Vendo via amazon.com. The game was shipped in a timely manner and the packaging protected the item from damage. I highly recommend this company and the game.

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This was like when I watched the movie SNAKES ON A PLANE, my reaction was: of course, why did no one ever think of this before?!

There is a great number of driving and racing games, some better than others. There is even a number of shooting&driving games. However, SPLIT/SECOND is a breed on its own.

When was the last time you had to race a collapsing overpass, dodge the load of an out-of-control crane or a wrecking ball, drive under a crash-landing cargo plane, survive a missile-firing helicopter attack, drift in an exploding airport hangar, or survive a Terminator-2 canal race?

Drifting (no wall-slamming penalty!), drafting, sling-shooting, close-calling crashes and General-Leeing your car will fill your Power Bar. Once it is full you can unleash PowerPlay attacks onto your AI opponents. And, trust me, you will hate them! From start to finish they will be scrapping your tailpipe - and you only need to slip for a split second to total your car. You can leave paint all over the walls but the moment your grill touches that central pillar or dumpster you are totaled. The good news is that respawning only takes a second - no time for the adrenaline to subside.

Choose the best car for the track and handling it will be no problem. Nevertheless, this is not an easy game - and, frankly, I missed those. Nowadays everything seems designed to be breezed through and quickly move on to the next game. Not this baby. Random events (not to mention unexplored shortcuts) make racing the same track feel like a new experience so memorizing the tracks will not be of much help. You will have to really hone your skills in order to advance. Quick advice: remap the PowerPlay buttons to something convenient as timing your attacks is essential.

Fallen behind and only half a lap to go? Well, drive your A-game - and make sure to... drop a burning bus on the opponents you could not overtake.Careful though: this knife cuts both ways. First, you must learn to avoid the attacks you triggered yourself and then you must be ready to speed around the ones your opponents spring on you. Split-second decisions are required throughout.

You are not a passenger so stop gawking at the scenery. Strap in and drive for your life!

The visuals will keep you at the edge of your seat and the screeching and explosion sounds will make the hairs at the back of your neck stand up every time. This is like playing a Hollywood summer action blockbuster. My only gripes are that there are no licensed cars (sorry, no Gallardos, no DB9s, no Shelbies) whereas customizing our rides is kept to a minimum and that you cannot change to a driver's perspective. That would have taken the experience to a whole new level!

SPLIT/SECOND, obviously, is more of a well-made arcade than a simulation game. And it is great FUN!

RECOMMENDED.

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This game is extremely fun. Being able to interact with the environment, create explosions to destroy your opponents, and ultimately change the racing course is great. You try to time your "power plays" so that a truck may explode and skid across the track into your opponents car in front of you, or have a falling building destroy a bunch of cars and create a new route with lots of high jumps, or even having a plane crash into a runway that is part of the race track. Power plays are gained by drifting, drafting, and dodging the malicious environment. The graphics are undeniably phenomenal. The fantasy cars look fairly real, though design can be repetitive. The tracks are great fun, and most of them has one or more have epic track changes. Track changes basically look like this: A ship will tip over and crash into the runway pwning all cars in the way, and provide a new part of the map with new obstacles to control. It also shortens the track to give advantage to whoever triggers it. There are 11 tracks, but almost half of them look the same with a bit of a twist. Other game modes like survival (running by giant trucks that dump explosive barrels at you) give you other maps, but still look very similar to the maps in regular racing. Another great thing is that you get SPLIT SCREEN!! this is great. I have a buddy come over and we play against each other on the same computer screen. Games like Blur do not offer this, and if you do not have a solid online community, playing by yourself can be dull. You can have both players on one keyboard, both use xbox controllers, or one with controller and one with keyboard.

After playing the game for a bit, you start to figure out all the places that you can trigger stuff, and may lesson the excitement. The Campaigns are fun, but get repetitive. The levels get extremely difficult and ultimately discourage players from wanting to finish it. I spent many hours on one campaign and never getting first. There is little story line at all, other than a commentator (a pretty good one) only talks when you enter a new session, but doesn't talk at all otherwise. I can see that they did not fully develop the idea of commentating. The music is also poor, so you may want to put on some exciting music for the background instead of in game music. The AI can unrealistic: does not spin out of control when you slam into them, whereas the opposite is true. They also seem to catch up when you are far ahead first, though this keep things from being dull.

All in all, great game but doesn't seem to be fully developed. A lot more work could have been done to perfect this epic racing game. There also isn't much customization due to the nature of console ports. Other than that and the previously reported flaws, I highly recommend this game.

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I just received my pre-ordered copy of Split/Second today.

I had a big problem with configuring the display options in the game.

If you have a multi-monitor display setup, do yourself a favor and disable the extra monitors before starting the game for the first time. Get in, change the game resolution to match the native resolution of your monitor, and then exit the game. This should end up being a "set it and forget it situation". It should be safe to enable your other displays and the the game should keep the happy settings for your primary display.

Here are my adventures along the way:

When I first installed, I had both screens active. I was "treated" to a low resolution setting that did not fill my 1920x1200 primary display.

When I tried to change the settings, the game window changed size but went black with no way to navigate the menus (I had to Esc out or kill the application).

I found a thread suggesting you could change the settings with the single display active & then switch to the desktop to re-enable the second monitor. I made the mistake of doing this while the game was running. (Don't try this at home!) The game wouldn't hold input focus - the screen flickered and twitched between active applications. I couldn't exit from the game menu. I couldn't click the Task Bar to close the game. I could start Task Manager, but couldn't keep it "in front" to end a task... I had to hit the power button to initiate a shut down!

If you have a single monitor setup, you won't experience these problems. The game itself seems to be a bundle of fun, forgiving, frenetic action. It would be nice if a patch fixed the setup issues. Now that I have it configured happily, I guess the game isn't quite as evil as I first thought...

Other annoyances:

1. You are forced to run through training missions before you get to the game menu. You have to play on the default resolution to start out.

2. The menu structure isn't very clear about how to get in and out, you feel like you're giving up your progress to get out of the game. I managed to restart a race instead of exiting on one occasion (and I've only completed 4 races). After running Split/Second a few more times, I feel I was too easy on the menus - they're awful, awkward and slow...

3. There is no map or progress indicator - just a lap count. I guess I've just been spoiled by DiRT2... I'd like to see how much race is left, how the track is laid out, and my position relative to the competition.

4. Did I mention the menu navigation is frustrating!?!

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I played the demo and heard good word of mouth, so I bought it. The game is as fun, if not even more fun than the demo, however it feels like they really phoned in the PC version as it practically screams a hasty port.

The game identifies my racing wheel as a 'Joypad' and when playing it without any workarounds, it makes it so turning the wheel 45 degrees barely turns the car enough for a lane change, let alone hard corners. There are no options in the game to configure sensitivity, dead-zones, or anything of the sort (and tech support told me that there's no support at all for it). All you can do is redefine which buttons / axes are for what. I had to go into my wheel's software and make 45+ degree deflection a big dead-zone to bring the steering to some acceptable limits.

The options menu in the game has an option to turn Rumble on/off and this option is grayed out when there isn't a controller connected that supports it, but rumble does not work at all, regardless of whether you turn it on or off with a supported controller. After emailing tech support, they have informed me that, even though there's a menu option to turn it on / off, Rumble is completely unsupported (eh?).

So the PC version not only doesn't support the things you think it should, but it even has options within the menus that are leftover from the console versions and don't even function on the PC.

The menus themselves are somewhat cumbersome as well. Most games have some way to hit ESC or CTRL-Q or something to quit from wherever you are, but you have no option in Split/Second but to slowly back out through a slalom of ESC and TAB key entries to back out of cryptic layers of menus to get back to the Main Menu, which is the only one with a Quit option. CTRL-ALT-DEL / End Task is the only fast/easy way to quit this game.

It's unfortunate that such a fun game gets such a shoddy port for the PC, but I'm not even sure if a wheel for the PS3 or 360 versions would work anyway.

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Do not bother buying this game if you intend to play it on a PC. You will get what is obviously, a console only game, with only the most basic support for a PC. There is NO support for a racing wheel/pedal combination (which the game identifies as a "joypad"), no ability to significantly re-assign buttons or keys for racing and you will end up either having to play from the keyboard, or reaching back and forth between wheel and keyboard to access functions.

During game-play, you will have to build "power" to access the various functions (Explosions, track changes, etc.) Building "power" to access the power-ups requires you to "drift" your car, which on a wheel/pedal set-up means you must violently turn the wheel, let off the gas, quickly stab down on the brake pedal, let off the brake and slam the gas back down and hold the wheel over for a short "drift". Repeat over and over and over in order to build enough power to play the game as intended. This will quickly lead to extreme leg fatigue, or broken pedals (unless you have very expensive metal pedals and the ability to apply them very quickly, but very gently).

As if that wasn't enough, there is NO force feedback, a "rumble" option that does not "rumble", no E-brake and more frustration than this game warrants.

The game-play is purely arcade and simply does not work well on a PC. I have a very advanced driving set-up for my PC and I own nearly all the driving sims/games that there are. This one is among the worst. Buy it for a console, buy it for its arcade action, buy it if you are 9 yrs old, but don't buy it if you wanted a blow-em up, action racer that you can play on your PC - because, with this game, you can't.

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