Gaming Target - Xbox: Apex

Written by Leigh Culpin on November 19, 2002

First Impressions: Can YOU reach the Apex?

There are loads of driving games on all platforms these days, and countless titles that are all created in the shadow of popular franchises - Project Gotham Racing, the Need for Speed series, and Gran Turismo. The sea of racing games out there has the occasional promising wave for you to ride, but more often than not, these games tend to be few and far between. Apex hopes to be one of those few - a racing simulation game, it's not your typical lay on the gas and go, as you're not only a driver, you're head of a new car company that needs to prove itself and its vehicles. Rather than being directly rewarded with cash for winning races, you'll sell a set number of cars depending on your finish position, and that in turn allows you some more cash to further your entrepreneurial experiences.

You'll start off with the ability to choose one (and only one) out of three basic car chassis; a car which is going to represent your company for the first few races. You'll be able to tweak it to a limited point early on, with more and more options becoming available as you progress through the game. There's even a test track for you to try out your vehicles on to make sure they handle like you want them too. However, though you start with only one car, the game has a rather wide variety of vehicles - more than 70 in fact - and those aren't just "your" brand of cars either, but licensed vehicles from some big names like Lotus and Jaguar (maybe we'll see that waaaaay too sexy V12 Vanquish from the new Bond film...), and since the sounds you'll hear will actually be recorded from the cars, hopefully we'll get some nice bassy engine effects. Speaking of aesthetics, the game is certainly good looking, and will almost without doubt be as good as, if not significantly better looking, than Gotham was. Furthermore, each car has a complex damage model (the lack of detailed damage models was one of my biggest irks with Gotham), so you'll be able to really see the damage you inflict upon your poor little prototypes.

Each track (there are over 50 planned) is loosely based on a real-world location, so you'll get that sort of nostalgic feeling on many of the tracks, though many will undoubtedly be in similar locations (as was the case with Gotham and all other racing games with such a number of tracks), so expect maybe half a dozen different world locales. The tracks are also set to be around 500,000 polygons, which, needless to say, is a rather large amount and should give the designers lots to work with, both visually and length-wise.

Multiplayer modes are currently looking somewhat dismal, unfortunately, with no mention of anything but a two-player mode, but with a March 2003 release date, there's lots of time for Live implementation or at least some system-link play, so don't yet discount the possibility. The game's AI is set to be smarter than usual, and is theoretically going to be capable of making context-based split-second decisions rather than just following a preset path. The game will also present you with a varied series of cutscenes depending on what path you take your new company on, so despite the currently weak multiplayer options, you should have lots to keep you busy.