World of Outlaws: Sprint Cars Review

[RaychelSnr]

World of Outlaws: Sprint Cars is a game that wants you to like it. It gets plenty about the dirt-track series right but cannot quite overcome some glaring flaws and broaden its appeal to all race fans.

Since the World of Outlaws is a dirt-track series with unique purpose-built cars, the controls will take some getting used to for most players. The controls are the basic gas, brake and steering. Newcomers should take note that sprint-cars’ brakes are set to be very strong on the left-front wheel in order to pitch the car into a slide to get around the corner -- they are not really used to slow down.

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[BIG CAROLINA]

For 20 bucks I am sure some OSers would not mind slinging some dirt online. Sad to hear about the offline difficulty though.

[Squeezee12]

ya other than the offline difficulty it has been a lot of fun.

[TCrouch]

Thoughts are pretty well done--I'm surprised by the "no challenge on arcade mode with full difficulty", though.

If you can dominate Arcade on Pro, then nobody should be touching you online, either. The model is the same, the assists are off (but in career mode they're hard-coded to be enabled). I'd be curious to see the lap times, because I consider myself an above-average driver and can win my share of online races, but hardly dominate Arcade on Pro with ease.

I feel like one of "those guys" that disagrees with a score, but to each his own. The complaints are valid points--they just don't bug me personally as much as the reviewer, I think.

For example, the knock on commentary I don't get. Not many racing games do have in-race or post-race commentary--not Forza, not PGR, not a NASCAR game, etc. Most of the time you're too focused on the racing to listen to commentary. It's almost like it's viewed through a traditional sports game perspective, expecting commentary like a basketball game or football game would have. A racing game, especially a budget game like WoO, wouldn't be expected to have anything like that IMO.

[jrp1918]

Well, I tend to view licensed racing games like this and NASCAR titles as sports simulations, not just racing-sims. Since they are on TV and have personalitiesm I think they should have commentary and presentation like their NBA/NFL counterparts. But that's just my POV.

As for the difficulty, Arcade mode doesn't have smarter or faster drivers, the cars are just harder to handle because the assists are off. As for laptimes, I have the lap record at a few tracks and am usually close to it.
For example at Velusia my best is 14.16 and that's usually about a full second faster than the next fastest.

Online, I don't know why but I don't seem to win.

[TCrouch]

Right, but are you simulating driving it or watching it on TV? I guess the same argument could be made for almost any sport, but having it as a major knock in a genre that's lacking it across the board doesn't seem natural to me. Different strokes. Most guys that are into racing games have a different mindset than the presentation guys in an NFL game, for example.

Reasoning is pretty simple--in a typical sports broadcast, there's a single focal point of action. In basketball, it's where the ball is. Same with football. In a racing sim, you have 43 cars (in NASCAR), or 24 in an A feature in WoO. You can't have traditional commentary because nobody's going to care if somebody goes for a pass 17 places behind you, which is what a typical TV broadcast does--hop from hot spot to hot spot. The alternative is to give commentary on the player's actions, and then it's no longer like a broadcast but something else entirely. There's no simple fix.

I agree it would be cool to have your career stats or achievements touted in some sort of in-game presentation, but no game on the market does that that I can recall--let alone a $20 title.

The track record in the game is probably a full second or more slower than most guys run online, and on Volusia I'm at 13.46, so it makes sense as far as online victories.

I still don't know how you don't get slide jobbed every corner by the cars on Pro in arcade, though. I can nail a line perfectly and the AI will still dive under you and try to take the corner away, and if you burn the slightest bit of speed spinning the tires, you'll get eaten alive on the exit on the larger tracks. The smaller bullrings are easier to just plow forward and stay there, but it's bizarre to me.

Are you using setups or anything to help the car? I didn't touch any setup options since you can't use any of them online, which makes the cars a lot more squirrely than in career mode.

[jrp1918]

I don't know man, I don't touch the setups because all I ever do is make the car worse, but I really don't have any problem beating the AI in Arcade mode on Pro. I don't what to tell you.

[Squeezee12]

Ya i dont mess with the setups because every time i have it made the car a lot worse than i started with...