REKT! High Octane Stunts

Genre: Stunt Driving

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

REKT! is what you’d get if you took a Tony Hawk game and did it with cars instead of skateboards. Players drive around enclosed arenas performing stunts, completing goals, and collecting pickups within a time limit.

Graphically, this game manages some impressive feats while still managing to disappoint. On the one hand, this game has a crisp resolution and smooth framerates even in 4-player split-screen mode, and the way your cars deform as they crash is a really nice touch. On the other hand, the levels feel really bland and featureless, with very little personality to them beyond the garish colors they consist of (which, to the game’s credit, change to reflect your point multiplier). I really want to compliment this game’s smooth visuals, but I can’t help but be simultaneously bored by them.

As for the gameplay, this game does a good job of providing a solid foundation to make for some fun stunt-work in the game’s arenas – driving these cars feels fun, and performing stunts is relatively easy without being devoid of challenge. It’s particularly nice that they worked in a combo system to encourage players to keep a chain of stunts going, giving this game the same nice arcadey element that made the early Tony Hawk games so compelling.

But… and sadly I have to add in that “but”… it quickly becomes apparent how little variety there is here. Players can spin their cars or flip them during a jump, they can drift, they can go in loops… and that’s about it. It’s up to the levels to provide much-needed variety, and not only do the levels look somewhat boring, as I stated before, but they are extremely limited in number – there are three single-player levels and four multiplayer levels.

The best thing this game has going for it is its split-screen multiplayer, which sacrifices none of the quality of the single-player game. There are a decent smattering of game modes here, though only some of them are worthwhile – players can compete to get the most points, or race to be the first to goals appearing throughout an arena in Baja mode, both excellent options. Alternately, there are the Capture the Crown and Virus modes which, while cool in theory, both require players to be able to bash their cars into one another, which is frustratingly difficult to do in practice.

I really, really, really want to give REKT! more credit. There simply aren’t enough Tony Hawk-style games out there, let alone ones with such smooth visuals and solid gameplay. Unfortunately, the game is so content-poor and its visuals so featureless and bland that the game just can’t reach the potential I feel is just under the surface.

tl;dr – REKT! is a Stunt Driving game that plays like a Tony Hawk game with cars. It has some good multiplayer support and surprisingly smooth visuals, but the levels are too bland and the game overall is lacking in content. Still a fun time, but this could have been so much better.

Grade: B-

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