Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: Motor Mayhem

Written by John Scalzo on July 16, 2001

Full Review: It's a mad, mad world!

The future. The time of flying cars, space travel, and violent death sports populating every channel of your new satellite dish. And the most popular of these sports, just edging out Smash TV and The Running Man, is the Vehicle Combat League - car combat by the way of Quake and Mortal Kombat. But you have to wonder what this says about our hope for the future when all these games and movies depicting future sports always involve death and destruction?

Philosophizing aside, you'll notice two things when you first turn on Motor Mayhem. One, this game really resembles the old Nintendo 64 game Extreme G. And two, its nowhere near as dark and gory as Twisted Metal Black. But forget Twisted Metal black for a minute and take a look at what Motor Mayhem gives us.

Motor Mayhem has three main play modes: Quick Start, Career, and Vs. Quick Start is pretty self-explanatory, you pick your car, you pick your opponents and you blast your way through the arena. It's fairly customizable as you can choose to play by points, time limit, or last man standing rules and you can pick which weapons you want to use. In Career mode, you're given the choice of entering three different tournaments. You can play Eliminator, and try to be the last man standing. You can play straight Deathmatch and play to a certain number of kills. And you can play Endurance, as you try to survive a constant barrage of one-on-one battles. All these tournaments play out just any old fighting game as you work your way up the ladder to fight Shao Khan, I mean Buzzsaw.

Everything in Motor Mayhem is bright and colorful and a complete 180 from the dark, brooding Twisted Metal Black. All the arenas are detailed and large, but all looking kind of the same after awhile. All of the explosions and weapon animations are rendered beautifully. And all of the vehicles have some nice detail to them, even if they again start to look similar right form the beginning. Motor Mayhem has nine "unique" characters, but really the only things that set them apart is how fast they go, how they handle and how strong their armor is. Motor Mayhem for the most part moves at a good framerate, but there is a little slowdown here and there when a lot of stuff is happening on screen. Usually you'll be having too much fun to notice though. As for the audio side of things, all of the in game tunes and sound effects are average at best and nothing is really memorable. It's your standard set of explosions, missiles, machine gun fire, and generic "action" music. But The Crystal Method and Methods of Mayhem lend some songs to the menus.

Motor Mayhem is not without it's faults though. Number one on this list is the god-awful controls. Getting your vehicle to go where you want it to go is a tremendous chore. And the default control scheme is not exactly what you'd call user friendly. The bad control really takes effect when you try to use Motor Mayhem's other Mortal Kombat inspired feature: a combo system. Each character has a set of special moves that can be activated through various button combinations. But with the bad control and awful default setup, they're more trouble than they're worth so you'll probably never use them, or die trying.

And my other big complaint with Motor Mayhem is that the artificial intelligence is not exactly of the same caliber as Deep Blue. I'd say it's closer to the intelligence of your blue toaster. Your opponents just never try to not get away, when you're fighting a guy, more often than not it'll come down to a shootout and whoever has the biggest gun wins (that's why you always go for those gauss Cannons and Artillery Shells, works every time). Other times you'll be riding your opponent's ass the whole time pumping shots into them until they're dead. It just gets too easy too often.

Motor Mayhem also features a decent multiplayer mode that is basically just like the Quick Start mode except with a split screen. There are no surprises, and unfortunately no 4-player option, but it gets the job done as a 2-player game. And as a true bonus, the load times throughout the entire are all relatively short, no more than 15 - 30 seconds, ever.

Motor Mayhem definitely has some flashes of brilliance. It's great fun to be able to just fly through an arena blasting everything in sight until you reign supreme over the flaming wreckage of your opponents. I had a true blast playing this game, but then you get a little slowdown, or your opponents stop trying, or most often the controls give out and you're knocked back to Earth. But it is fun while it lasts.