Recent reviews by SpiderMax

Get it while you still can. The game is going to be unavailable for purchase in December 2024.

The map is much more interesting than Horizon 5 and the tracks to race on are more interesting. Also, the live-service parts were not as heavy and time consuming here as they are in the latest iteration. Also, you can earn most cars you missed in the weekly challenges with the backstage passes.
Nowadays, there are no updates to the live-service playlists, but you can still play multiplayer.
Still, this means there are unachievable achievements now.

It is funny how a game that would have been considered garbage 10-15 years ago is now something you can recommend to everyone looking for a nice racing game to have fun driving in. Still, there are many things to criticize here.
First, there is a heavy reliance on AI here to deliver some sort of “story” mode which honestly, I could do without. Forgettable characters with boring names, generic appearances obviously generated and voiced by AI. However, that can still be fun if you imagine yourself to be in a city controlled by AI and you are the last human, showing the AI how it is done! (please don’t use AI in final products… smh)
The cars are not licensed, but basically one to one recreations of existing cars. I am very much pro non-licensed cars because it gives developers the opportunity to use cars we rarely see in racing games. CarX Street for example features a BMW M5 station wagon or a Nissan Z30 convertible. In theory, this also allows them to feature proper damage models, as there are no manufacturers that can disallow their licenced cars to be destroyed onscreen. CarX Street does not feature a real damage model though.
The driving feels really nice. The physics are a mixture of Forza and Need For Speed maybe. They feel realistic enough to convey the feeling of real driving (or as good as that is gonna feel with a controller) while still being arcadey-enough to allow for relaxed gameplay without thinking too much about what the car is doing in corners or while braking.
In the settings you have the option to set how congested you want traffic to be, from empty streets like in Forza, all the way to traffic jams like in Midnight Club LA. Traffic uses indicators when switching lanes and reacts to oncoming traffic, which is a nice change when you are used to years of Forza’s unwillingness to improve core mechanics of open world racing games.
This brings me to the level of difficulty. The game can be quite challenging, especially when trying to max the speed you take through corners. From time to time, you run into little pieces of geometry like planters or just plain walls at the side of roads that can cause massive crashes, basically ending your race. I found the AI being generally of a similar pace as my car which makes crashes very punishing, but it is also very satisfying when you barely miss a truck on the road. Also, I can’t believe I would ever miss road barriers at the side of roads. So, when you drive the mountain roads and lose the car, the guardrail will not just crumple into little pieces but stop the car as it is intended to do. (looking at you, Forza)
Another point is progression which is definitely on the slower side. However, who knew that when you are not bombarded with multi-million-dollar cars after every single race you didn’t even win, you really start to value the little upgrades you get.
So, the game is definitely more on the 6/10 side, but it is 100% a recommendation to everyone who is tired of Playground’s Forza and all the other devs doing the absolute bare minimum.

Lots of time spent in the menus for incredibly short rally stages which consist of "left 6, right 6, straight"... Where are the striking stages from Dirt 2 and 3? Everything looks so.. corporate in its design and just boring. There is no excitement at all in the presentation.
Nice gimmik to add two driving models, one for casuals and one for those who want more realism. However, the casual style ends up feeling way too grippy and the "simulation" physics just feel wrong. then they made the rally stages more realistic and narrower, but everything is procedually generated and feels samey as a consequence.
It is a real shame Dirt 1, 2 and 3 are not for sale anymore, but no one should feel sad they can't buy Dirt 4 anymore.

Feels a bit too much like Assassins Creed Odyssey for kids... I dont know, couldnt get into it since gameplay is kind of simple and I dont appreciate the narrator (basically, you play the game as a story is being told by a narrator).
If you dont mind silly humor, or you want something to play with a kid, maybe this is something for you.

Style for days.

Nice story with a few twists and turns. Entertaining characters and an interesting world/lore.
Gameplay is easy to get into at first, but there are a few tricks that need a bit of practice to pull of consistently.

You can play with inline-skates, skateboards and BMX, but as someone who played A LOT of Tony Hawk's, skateboards felt strange to get into and I felt like trick variety was lacking at first. But playing with inline-skates (Goth-Bel ftw), I realized the game doesn't need a huge trick variety like the Tony Hawk's games have.

Basically, you can do tricks with the face buttons B, X and Y. So there are three ground tricks, three air tricks and four grinds, if you add grinding without specifically pressing a trick button. On top of that you can do boost tricks that trigger when you trick while boosting. Those give higher points and boost you forward, but eat away at your boost bar. Skateboard, inline-skates and BMX all play the same, so there is no reason to pick one over the other aside from preference. I felt like inline-skates had the nicest feel to them though.

The only annyoance during gameplay personally were the last two stages, which both felt too linear in comparison to the other stages, which were usually set up with multiple larger areas to skate in. One of those stages is basically a pyramid you slowly ascend, but there is only one way up that contains an elevator that breaks your combo when you enter it, so you either stay in the lower half during a combo-run, or you are forced to start at the top. The other level has a small starting area with next to nothing to do and a huge corridor like walk-way with rails along both sides leading to an interesting end area.

If you plan on doing 100%, do the main story first and then complete the last two levels 100%, so you can end the game on the starting stages, which are way better.


What makes this game special is its style. And HOLY. Sick music, sick clothes, sick sprays.

Still great after playing it a third time. First the original in 2017 on the PS4 then Royal on PS4 when it originially released and now finally the PC port.

I would strongly recommend the game to anyone who enjoys RPGs with turn-based combat and to those who enjoy anime culture and the classic anime tropes that come with that.

The PC port is great. Unlocked framerate, no crashes or lags. That is to be expected from a game that was originally developed for the PS3, but it is reassuring that there are no bad surprises with the quality of this port.

Great to finally play the first DQB as well.

This is a port of the mobile version, which sounds worse than it is. There are a few nice additions like breaking and placing far away blocks with the mouse.

Square Enix, please make Dragon Quest Builders 3 now!!

literally game of the year! silly ruta was hardest to find smh...

Finally on Steam! Already pretty much 100%ed it with most skaters in the Epic store version, but will definitely do it again on Steam now.
Activision! Bring back Vicarious Visions and greenlight that 3+4 remake they were planning!! It is a crime they have not done so yet.

Game is a perfect reimagining of the first two games with the physiscs and controlls of the 4th (which were also reused in Underground 1 and 2 back in the day). The career mode can be replayed with every skater and every skater has different challenges to do as well as other more general challenges. As someone who religiously played the PS1 and PS2 era of Tony Hawk's games back in the day, this game is a dream come true.

Classic racing game that everyone who likes racing games should play at least once. The game features a career mode which has the player become a street racer. You meet racers, follow them to the start and then race them and some of their friends in usually three races.
Before a race, the opponent is introduced in a little cutscene that shows them make up their mind about the player character and then spout some nonsense along the lines of “Let’s see what you can do.” These cutscenes are super short and really not important at all. The whole thing boils down to the standard “Nobody becomes the Champion” story. Personally, I think the character introductions add some value to the game, especially in comparison to Midnight Club 3 whose opponents ended up being just names on a loading screen attached to a car.
There are three event types. The most common are normal races which are set up with a checkpoint system. You navigate the open world and head to checkpoints in a specific order. In the beginning the routes are obvious and orderly, but later races use checkpoints increasingly sparse which slowly introduces the idea of pathfinding for the ideal route. Traffic is not random and always the same for each restart, so you can learn the patterns of their movements. Expect to restart races multiple times in later stages of the career, as increasing speeds, traffic and confusing roads and routes become harder to handle.
On a few occasions you will have to flee from the police in a pretty barebones police chase event. These are basically just flee-and-hide, but they break up the tedium of too many races back-to-back and they are not annoying.
The last event type is the unordered race in which you must drive through all checkpoints and then drive to the finish first. These are by far some of the hardest races as they really test your ability to find the optimal route. Make sure to map the map to your controller, so you can quickly check the location of the next checkpoint. Unfortunately, Midnight Club 2 is a PS2 era game, not optimised for high resolutions. Modern resolutions work perfectly fine on a technical level, but higher resolutions automatically make the overlay smaller as it does not scale. This causes the map overlay to be rather smallish and really hinders quick route checks while driving. Back on the PS2 and its glorious 480-something-p the overlay was nicely large, covered the entire screen and as such you immediately could spot the little arrow indicating your location and the next intersection. Sounds strange, but with the speeds to race at, you will notice how hard it can be to keep track of where you have to go.
Don’t expect too much from the graphics. Personally, I love the PS2 charm of the graphics which have aged not too badly, aside from some of the character models. The music is pretty underground from what I can tell and ranges from rap to trance in Los Angeles, to more techno sounds in Paris and Tokyo. Every racer has their own theme song which plays in the background of their little cutscenes and then during the races. You can skip songs whenever you like, but each driver having their own song adds to their characters in a way and it gives the races a more curated feeling.
Midnight Club is super arcadey in its physics. By beating racers, you unlock more and more abilities which you can use during the races. These range from constantly used abilities like being able to use nitrous, a slipstream boost and controlling your car’s angle midair to lesser used abilities like two-wheel driving which you can use to weave through traffic. There are just about no corners you can’t make without a well-timed handbrake, but grip-driving is faster than drifting. This is mostly because cars are super grippy in the first place.
The arcade character of the game also comes out in its other gameplay systems, like its progression. After each racer beaten, you win their car. Their car will generally be faster and better than your previous car, so you will basically upgrade to a new car after each racer beaten (so every three races). In my experience this trend ends in the last third of the career, when you move over to the Tokyo chapter. The cars over their feel very distinct from another and you will find cars that are just too hard to control to be worthwhile. So, whenever a race is too hard, a change of cars is always worth a try. Motorcycles are just about the fastest option, but the risk for hitting something and falling off the bike is too big imo, as recovery is slow, and the lost time is rarely made up for.
After finishing the career, there are unlockables for finishing the arcade races of each city, and for 100% percent completion, which were fun enough to play around with as a kid, but nowadays…
All in all, it is still a great game I regularly replay, and it deserves to be put on one level with the greatest PS2 racers like NFS’s BlackBox era, GT3 and Burnout. Personally, I prefer it over Midnight Club 3 for the same reason I prefer NFS Underground 1 over its successor: It is simpler, more streamlined, quicker to get going and just shorter.