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Review: Armageddon Riders | PSNStores

Review: Armageddon Riders

Posted by on July 13th, 2011 | 0 Comments | Tags:

A racing game. With Zombies.  My favorite.

Armageddon Riders puts you in control of some guy in a leather jacket driving around a sweet car during the Armageddon.  He must participate in a series of goofy races/tasks so as to distract himself from the obvious end of the world.  The result is a game that lacks focus yet wasn’t a complete waste of my time.

For 10 bucks, the game looks pretty sharp.  Though the amount of cars are limited, there are enough customization options to make you feel like your ride is one of a kind(Mine looks like an X-wing right now with light sabers on the front of it).  The environments look good enough, making for a typical cityscape.  Oh, and there are zombies sparsely sprinkled everywhere.  They splatter the screen in gore (and fill up your NOS tank) with every collision.  The gore didn’t faze me, but my sisters and roommate were noticeably disgusted with what was going on up on the screen.

The music consists of guitar driven songs that can’t put up enough of an argument for me not to change to my superior custom playlist.  There is also a musical power up that plays a rip-off of thriller, making the zombies dance…ugh.

Controls are adequate, with the X boost used as a sort of duct tape to cover up bad driving.  Rather than E-braking right before entering a corner, I would often just slam into the wall and hit the boost instead.  I’m no pro at racing games and was able to win most races when employing this kind of strategy.  An accomplished racer can probably put some of these tracks to shame.  I ran into a ton of corner traps on almost every race though.  Rather than skidding against a wall, I would slam head on into the side of a building sticking out a few feet, bringing my car to a halt and most likely putting me in last place for the reminder of the race.  A more experienced racer probably wouldn’t complain about this, but it happened too many times to not make note of.

One thing I hate about racers is when the AI can rubber-band.  Often I ran into the top three holding the position for the entire race, and when one would get held up in a turn, it would usually fly back to its spot in the top three moments later.  It isn’t as bad as Mario Kart is with this aspect, but it certainly grinds my gears.

AR lets you drive around a hub world and choose from different missions.  The vast majority of the missions are races.  There are also side missions where you can collect extra money for upgrades in your garage.  These involve protecting an AI partner or collecting artifacts.  These will eventually start paying you some serious money, but they get old as you level up the same task over and over.  There are also arena missions that are a destruction derby of sorts.  I generally enjoyed their simple maniacal game play.  Can’t beat sprinting around the arena and playing chicken with an AI opponent.  Armageddon Riders also has an interesting race type which is an elimination mode.  Every 10 seconds or so, a skull will drop a bomb on the racer in last place.  This proceeds until every racer is eliminated.  Rather than the typical old race, this survival aspect actually got me more into the game than any others.  AR supports split screen as well.  You work through the single player as a common team.  Nothing special, but adds another level to the game.

At the end of the day, I had fun with this title.  Armageddon Riders provides an arcade-y experience and thankfully doesn’t take itself seriously.  Leave your brain at the door and run over some zombies.  (I can’t wait for the zombie fad to be over)

A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here. This review is for the PlayStation 3 version of the game.

General Info

  • Car Upgrades cost too much
  • Rubber Band AI
  • Jagged Corners