On the PC, combat racing games are a troubled breed. Powerdrome and Death Track were successful in the early days of PC gaming, but since then the genre has floundered. It's not that all the combat racing games out there are totally bad (although some of them are), it's just that none of them have been completely successful. Usually, either the racing is good and the combat is weak, or the combat is good and the racing is weak. Occasionally the entire game will be total garbage, but that's a rarity. Games like MegaRace, Cyberace, and Delta V all have their strong points, but they all have enough flaws to keep them from appealing to more than a core audience.
Slipstream 5000 from Gremlin Interactive is certainly a step in the right direction, but it still has some fairly large flaws. Still, this futuristic action racer is by far the best thing Gremlin has done, and marks a serious change of direction (and quality) for the company. Slipstream 5000 is far from perfect, but it's a hell of a lot of fun. Personally, I'm hoping for a sequel of some sort to give the folks at Gremlin the chance to correct a few of the mistakes that made their way into this game.
In Slipstream 5000 you pilot an armed hovercraft in a series of races for profit. You may choose from ten different vehicles. Unfortunately, they seem to differ only in appearance. The manual makes no note of the vehicles having different performance factors, and I could spot no differences in playing them. It would have been a good addition to have the different racer models tailored to specific styles of racing (speed vs. armament, that sort of thing), but I'll admit that this omission doesn't exactly break my heart.
Once you've decided which racer looks coolest, you choose to race either in practice mode (against drone ships, taking as many laps as you want), single race (just like it sounds), or championship mode, which lets you run the circuit of ten tracks. This brings me to my biggest problem with Slipstream. (I promise I'll start saying nice things very soon now). When you play the game for the first time, practice and single race modes will only let you select one course--the Grand Canyon. To gain access to the other tracks, you must race in the single-race mode and place in the top four; then you have practice/single race access to the next track, and on from there. To quote from "Plan 9 From Outer Space"... "Stupid! Stupid!" Say, for example, I'd like to try the Egypt track, but I can't quite get the hang of the Amazon course. Tough luck. If Gremlin is hell-bent on limiting the players' course selection (something I'm dead set against in the first place), they should have made every track available in practice mode, but make you qualify on each course before you join an actual race. That would have made a lot more sense to me.
Once you get past that annoying design flaw (hopefully the parties responsible for sacking the responsible parties have been sacked), Slipstream 5000 jumps all over you and sucks you in like any good arcade game should. This is largely due to the race courses themselves, which are often stunning. You'll fly through cities, the Grand Canyon, ice-capped fjords, and other objects of natural and man-made beauty. The graphics, although only in 320x200 VGA, are very pretty and offer a good amount of surface detail. A popular favorite here at the IE office, the Egyptian course sends you screaming over the desert sands, only to fly through tunnels bored directly into the pyramids themselves! The only course I didn't like was the Amazon, where the outdoor venue conspires with the large number of vines to bring the usually very smooth play down to a choppy level.
Not only do the courses look good, they are intelligently designed as well. Straight-aways are well balanced with sharp corners, and narrow tunnels (occasionally with moving walls and other obstacles) are also prevalent. Each course also has a repair tunnel, which is clearly marked to offset it from the normal race course; these tunnels always represent the most indirect route around their section of the track, but they can save your ship from destruction if you take on too much damage.
The combat, while not as strong an element as the racing itself, is handled better than in many games of this sort. You start the game armed with only blasters (which honestly aren't all that bad), but with each race you finish you earn extra money to spend on equipment. This option applies only to the championship mode. As you accumulate prize money you gain access to missiles that damage the engines of other craft, messes with their controls, and drop smoke screens behind you. All your weapons (even your blasters) have some degree of homing ability. This doesn't lend itself to the kind of frenzied firefights you'd see with non-homing weapons, but it does let you concentrate on the course while you mess with your opponents.
Slipstream 5000 may not be a perfect game, but you sure won't mistake it for Zephyr either. The course selection limitation may be irritating and it may not have the best sensation of speed you can find (Delta V still corners the market in that respect.), but Slipstream 5000 has enough adrenaline-soaked action to keep you coming back for more. If you've played other futuristic combat racing games and thought, "Hmmm, that was almost a lot of fun," Slipstream 5000 is a game you should check out.
