There's a certain bit of admiration you can feel for a game design that chucks reality out the window and decides to have a bit of fun. Such is the case with Domark's Big Red Racing, an arcade racing game that is even more out there than something like Interplay's Whiplash. At least that made some effort to simulate cars.
In Big Red Racing, you'll have a chance to race monster trucks, dump trucks, hovercraft, helicopters, moon buggies and Lord knows what else (16 in all). They each have their own matching terrain - race dump trucks in a quarry, or slide around in the ice in your lovely snowplow (there are 24 tracks in all). Never mind that all of the terrain pretty much handles the same. Never mind that all of the vehicles handle pretty much identically (they all have this odd floaty, bouncy feeling that makes it feel like your racing with the vehicle from Moon Patrol). Well, a tractor or snow-plow may handle in real-life as they do here, but no one on the staff can really verify it. However, we can say that this game is the ultimate dump-truck racing simulation.
It's all irrelevant because the game is quite entertaining to play, assuming you like your racing big, dumb and stupid. The game can be quite funny as well - the voice-over is nearly worth the price of admission. Less funny is the really annoying interface, where the characters all wig-out and manage to give you a headache in record time.
Multiplayer play is quite fun, but then again what game isn't really fun in multiplayer mode (assuming you can actually get them to work, that is). It's relatively cheap compared to everything else out there, and that's enough to say, "check it out."
The biggest problem with the game is the woeful control setup. When you choose your joystick setup, you can then assign everything to the joystick. Unfortunately, when you get to the part that you want to assign to the joystick, you'll find that they are too sensitive in detecting the joystick. It will register movement even if you don't move the stick. They should have checked for a greater range of motion before assigning the joystick that particular function. It took multiple attempts to actually configure the game, and then once the game started, it reverted to the previous settings.
Overall, the game has a slightly unpolished feel but is definitely worth a look if you're into this sort of thing. Just don't think about it too much and you'll be OK.
