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Battle Cars is a futuristic<\/span> combat racing<\/span> game clearly inspired by F-Zero, but it is not a clone of that great classic. F-Zero is my favorite 4th gen racing<\/span> game, but Battle Cars is worth playing as well.\u00a0 Indeed, it’s its own game in most respects.\u00a0 As much of this is bad as good — it’s a flawed game for sure — but genre fans like myself are sure to like it anyway, and it definitely has good points as well.<\/p>\n Battle Cars is a mode 7 game, as the above screenshot shows.\u00a0 The game has very few options — the only modes are 1 player, 2 player, 2 player versus, and options.\u00a0 The game does not have saving or passwords, so set some time aside for this one — you’ll need to do 20+ races without turning off the system, if you intend on beating the game. 1 player and 2 player are campaign modes, so yes, the game has a co-op campaign, which is pretty cool.\u00a0 The one player game is fullscreen, the two player game splitscreen, so it supports both modes — again a nice feature.\u00a0 This is also seen in Street Racer and presumably some other mode 7 racing<\/span> games<\/span>, but neither F-Zero nor Mario Kart did it (though Street Racer had 4 player splitscreen, while this has only two, it’s still nice.). 2 player versus allows you to choose a track (5 normal tracks and 9 cross-country tracks are available) and any of the six cars and go; this is the only mode where you can choose a track, or the three boss cars without a code, so there is no way to play a single race in one player mode, stupidly.<\/p>\n In the options menu you can change the difficulty, volume, etc.\u00a0 The difficulty levels really do matter; the game’s appreciably harder on Hard, and easier on Easy.\u00a0 You also don’t play the last few levels on Easy (the game ends early), or the first two levels on Hard, oddly enough for the latter case.\u00a0 The ending gets better with each difficulty level, to push you to try the higher ones.<\/p>\n During a race – Cross Country<\/p><\/div>\n In the game, there’s an onscreen indicator in the left (or center, for two-player mode). This shows your armor level (the bar), speed (the lower number), distance to the goal (in cross-country races) or ahead of the rival (in versus\/boss races) (the upper number, with a – for behind and a + for ahead), and the status of your shields.\u00a0 That latter point is important.\u00a0 When you hit the walls, or get hit by another car or mine, your shields may go dark red, instead of the default bright red.\u00a0 When shields are dark red and then you take another hit, or hit a wall again, your turbo goes offline for several seconds.\u00a0 When this happens, your health bar turns grey, and you immediately start falling behind because of how much slower you got.\u00a0 So yeah, try to avoid this… it’s cruel.<\/p>\n The controls are as follows.\u00a0 The d-pad turns, of course.\u00a0 A accelerates.\u00a0 X brakes.\u00a0 B fires your current weapon.\u00a0 Y switches weapons.\u00a0 And L and R are sharp-turn buttons, to make turns quickly.\u00a0 Pressing L and R together jumps, which causes great damage if you land on top of another vehicle (indeed, slowing cars down with fire and then jumping on them is a good tactic, once you can get it down).\u00a0 Pressing down plus L and R effects an instant reverse, useful if you get turned around.\u00a0 Down plus L or R does a sideswipe attack, which is stronger if you also press left or right at the same time.\u00a0 The main problem with the controls is that you must regularly hit Y while holding A, which, if you think about it, is NOT comfortable.\u00a0 Either you need to momentarily let go of the accelerator to switch weapons — not a great idea — or use an odd way of holding the controller. It’s kind of annoying, but you do get used to it… and no, there’s no control configuration options.<\/p>\n There are three weapons that the vehicles in Battle Cars are equipped with. The main weapon is the Disc.\u00a0 This round shot fires straight, but then bounces off of the walls once it hits one.\u00a0 It’ll keep going for a while.\u00a0 It’s a very useful weapon, but does take three shots to kill other cars in cross-country mode if you just use the gun, so unless you jump on them or something too it can be hard to do while finishing in time.\u00a0 The other two weapons are the Homing Missile, which, as the name sounds, homes in on the vehicle in front of you, and the Grenade, which acts like a mortar, shooting in front of your car.\u00a0 The homing missile might sound great, and it is, but as you can only have one weapon fired off at any time, if you shoot a missile and it doesn’t hit anyone for a while, as can happen, you can be left without weapons at a crucial time.\u00a0 As for the grenade, it’s very useful and damaging if you can hit with it, but hitting is the trick… Also, you have no weapons that can hit someone behind you, which is a complete pain.\u00a0 I’d LOVE to have mines.\u00a0 And on that note, some computer cars do have mines. None have projectiles, like you do, oddly enough, but many can drop mines behind them.\u00a0 Why you have projectiles but not mines, while the computer has mines but not projectiles, I have no idea, but it’s kind of odd.\u00a0 It works, but it’s odd.<\/p>\n Choosing a color<\/p><\/div>\n In the main game, the 1p or 2p co-op modes, you choose one of three cars (or six, if you use a code to unlock three more or play in 2p versus mode) and go.\u00a0 There’s another code that allows you to choose one of eight colors for your car, or after you beat the game you unlock this as well.\u00a0 Of course, turning off the system loses that, so the main way to change car colors is with the cheatcode (see GameFAQs).\u00a0 The cars are somewhat reminiscent of something in Rock n Roll Racing<\/span>, though this game predates that one.\u00a0 The tracks, though, look like something out of F-Zero, though without the jumps.\u00a0 The graphics are good, and I like the variety of locations, including a polluted city wasteland, a water planet, etc.\u00a0 Each place looks different.\u00a0 This is clearly a dystopian future, as the art makes obvious, but humanity has survived… and met aliens too, as you’ll find later in the game.<\/p>\n Cross Country race… grey bar, so they’ve been slowed. Poor driver.<\/p>\n Once you’ve begun the game, you go to the first planet and location.\u00a0 The way the game works is that each of the ten (in Normal difficulty) locations is broken up into two races.\u00a0 \u00a0The first race is a Cross-Country race, and the second is the boss race.\u00a0 There is no 3-2-1-Go text in this game — the instant that you see the track the race has begun, so hold down the accelerator from the first second or you’ll immediately fall behind.\u00a0 Yeah, it’s kind of weird.\u00a0 In the cross-country race, a one-way race, you have a preset time amount and try to complete the track before time runs out.\u00a0 While you drive, you also want to try to destroy as many of the traffic vehicles as possible.\u00a0 The game will continue if you run out of time, but the traffic vehicles will be replaced with dangerous bombs, so try to finish in time.\u00a0 While you can’t immediately choose to replay these races, if you fail the boss race, you can redo the cross-country race, and your points and money carry over, so it’s a way to build up your car more, if you choose.\u00a0 The cross-country races are fun and decently challenging as well. Each time you finish a cross-country race, you go to the upgrades screen.<\/p>\n The upgrade screen.<\/p><\/div>\n At the end, your points are totaled.\u00a0 You get money based on how many cars you destroyed and credits based on how much time was left on the clock (no money if you ran out of time, of course).\u00a0 The money can be spent on car upgrades, of which there are six types — Engine (increase base max speed), Turbo (increase turbo speed), armor, Jump, Tires, and something else.\u00a0 Engine and turbo are the most important powerups, but you need to somewhat balance it out.\u00a0 Having enough upgrades is VERY important — later bosses will be quite hard if you aren’t powered up enough.\u00a0 \u00a0Turbo is automatic, not a separate button — it’ll activate as long as you hold the accelerator down, unless it’s disabled temporarily. I’ve found that the cross-country courses very in difficulty — in some I found it pretty much impossible to finish in the given time, but with others it wasn’t too hard, and the difficulty curve wasn’t entirely linear either.\u00a0 At least you can also get money with kills.<\/p>\n Now, there’s one odd thing about the money system.\u00a0 In addition to cash for car upgrades, the game also has weapon upgrades, for the game’s three weapons.\u00a0 However, you don’t buy weapon upgrades with money. Instead, you buy them with the Credits.\u00a0 Why you buy car upgrades with one kind of money (from kills) and weapon upgrades with another (from time) I have no idea, but that’s how it works.\u00a0 Each type of money is not transferable to the other.\u00a0 You an upgrade the three types of weapons to make them stronger.<\/p>\n During a race – Boss race<\/p>\n Once you exit the upgrade screen, you go to the second race of each location, the boss race. Here, you face off against a challenging, and indestructible, rival driver.\u00a0 There are still traffic cars on the track, to get in your way, lay mines in your path, and such, but the one that’s your main challenge is the track’s boss.\u00a0 Before each race the boss will say a few words to you, and then it begins.\u00a0 Remember, hold accelerate, you don’t want to fall behind at the start!\u00a0 Each boss race is two laps on a track, and each one has its own course.\u00a0 The bosses start out not too hard, but get quite tough in the later going.\u00a0 The last three or four boss races took me many tries each.\u00a0 You can shoot the bosses, but can’t kill them; it’ll only slow them down. As the bosses were often faster than me though, this was vital, as it was about the only way to get ahead… as for staying there?\u00a0 Well, you better hope you have enough speed powerups.\u00a0 Otherwise, stay close, shoot the boss at the end, and hope for the best.\u00a0 Because I didn’t do well enough on some of the cross-country events, I had to do some of this.\u00a0 So yeah, the game can be frustrating.\u00a0 It was fun enough to be worth continuing the effort, though, and it eventually paid off once I got past each boss.\u00a0 If you fail, you are given the chance to retry the race, retry the cross-country race again (with, as I said before, all your current upgrades and money), or quit the game and give up.\u00a0 You can continue as much as you want, but man do I badly wish the game had passwords… it’s kind of long for a game with no saving!\u00a0 At least you do get a decent reward once you beat the game, though — there’s a nicely long ending that made completing the game more satisfying.\u00a0 It promises even more in the hard mode ending, too.<\/p>\n Title Screen<\/p><\/div>\n The tracks are reminiscent of F-Zero, as I said, but they have their own style too — they’re not ripoffs, they have a different identity.\u00a0 For one thing, sharp turns are very common — you’ll need those sharp-turn buttons a lot, because otherwise you’ll be bouncing off the walls and getting slowed down as a result.\u00a0 Learn the courses!\u00a0 Also, while the tracks are usually on the narrow side, there are some parts which widen out significantly.\u00a0 In these areas, you’ll need to memorize where the path goes, or follow the computers, in order to learn it — it’s not always immediately obvious.\u00a0 The tracks are long as well, and each one takes a good while to drive through, so two laps (or one, for the cross-country courses) does not feel short.<\/p>\n If you want it to be longer though, for the 2-player versus mode you can change the number of laps from 2 to 10.\u00a0 Sadly there’s no one player mode with this option, just like how there’s no 1p single race mode.\u00a0 You can also enable or disable bosses in 2p vs. mode, and choose between having all the weapons, none, or just the Disc (and again, no, no options like these for a 1p mode).\u00a0 In splitscreen mode the graphics are simpler — the courses are just a track on a black background, instead of having a colorful environment like you have in the single player, full-screen game — but given that F-Zero didn’t have multiplayer at all, it’s great that it was included here.<\/p>\n Overall, Battle Cars is an interesting, but frustrating and somewhat odd, game.\u00a0 On the one hand, it’s great to see because there are FAR too few 4th gen F-Zero inspired games<\/span> out there — you’d think that its success led to numerous copies, but for some reason it didn’t. Really, this is one of the few.\u00a0 I like the visual style — mode 7 looks great for a futuristic<\/span> racing<\/span> game — and the gameplay, while frustrating unless you’re good at the game, is fun.\u00a0 The designers made some odd choices, like the missing one-player single race mode and the very long, linear campaign with no saving, not to mention the various unlockables that are kind of pointless as unlocks because it doesn’t save (thankfully they’re accessible via codes too!), and there’s also that frustration until, or unless, you get good at the game, but even so, it’s a good game overall.\u00a0 I give it a B or B-.\u00a0 Most would likely score it lower, but I love futuristic racing games, so it deserves that B<\/span><\/strong>. It helps that I love futuristic<\/span> racing<\/span> games<\/span>, of course, but even so, this is a fun game.\u00a0 It’s something that most people have overlooked, but it’s worth more attention than it has gotten.\u00a0 The graphics are good, track designs are great and challenging, the gameplay is unique in some good ways as well as the bad, and despite some issues, I’m happy to have gotten this game and will definitely be playing it more.\u00a0 I still need to tackle Hard mode, after all… I’ve only beaten it on Normal. Battle Cars is a Mode 7 futuristic racing game for the Super Nintendo.\u00a0 It’s not particularly well known, but it is a good game well worth playing!\u00a0 This review isn’t very old and needed only minor touchups.\u00a0 I don’t know … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/img.gamefaqs.net\/screens\/a\/0\/b\/gfs_40138_1_2.jpg\")
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<\/a><\/p>\n Battle Cars is a flawed game, but good overall even so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"