Splashdown Impressions

Well I finnally got to sit down and really play Splashdown and I have developed my initial impressions

being that these are initial the euphoria is still strong and I will have to update on my feelings a little later


My impressions are WOW !!

The gameplay shares similiarties to ATV Offroad fury in the way you control the pitch and Yaw of the craft, the differences after that are obvious do to the water based and land based craft

Splashdown is not a game you will pick up and start beating in the 1st hour or 3. It takes time to discover the balance of turning, leaning back and landing your craft without losing your momentum. Once you start to discover the feel the game starts to become fun

Tricks are necessary to gain an advantage but not to the extent of SSX/Tricky. Yes you need to do tricks and when you succesfully complete a trick your boost meter builds up. Holding a trick gives you more. Once your meter is built up you don\'t have to do any tricks for awhile and you can concentrate on racing.  The boost is automatic and you will accelerate a little faster and have a little higher top speed. Over doing tricks will cause you to lose races when you screw up and wipe out, not all jumps are huge enough to pull off tricks. So there is a balance which is nice cause concentrating on controlling your craft is necessary to win.

With boost I can catch up or whiz by opponents on straight aways, and if I can nail my turns close to perfection I can maintain that advantage. Opponents seem to turn better and regain some of the lead I create in turns. Which is a testament to physics of the crafts handling. You need to use true to life techniques to turn/land jumps and maintain momentum. Its not to hard to mess this up slightly or majorily and lose precious time

The game itself is challenging. If you mess up you will have trouble early on learning how to regain the lead, but it gets easier when you start to master the feel. If you mess up towards the middle or end of lap 3 it will be a close finish for you to win


So far course design is pretty cool with the Madrid level being a Unusual tiered giant coloseum swimming pool. The others I have played are all semi true to life in design. I still have quite a few levels to play so I can not comment on them all yet.

Graphics are Absolutely Stunning  Arguably one of the best the PS2 has shown to date.

Alaising problems are almost non existent and to be honest I only noticed Alaising problems in  the far distance of the top of the Madrid colliseum. This game is a testamanet to the fact that the PS2 can do AA pump out great graphics and maintain a solid high framerate

The water is amazing. There are numerous times in the game where I simply say "That is friggin water not graphics"



Only peeves OI have so far is

I haven\'t found any significant "shortcuts" which I thought was supposed to exist

and I\'m not sure when or if I can perform Level 2 and 3 tier tricks yet. I\'ve only been doing Level 1 so there is this much more of the game I have yet to discover

Soundtrack is a little weak. I can\'t wait till we can rip our own soundtracks and give credit to Xbox for having that ability now.


This game is a must rent, and if you want a different style of racer in your library that will wow your friends and family with eye candy then its a must buy IMO. The game is HIGH QUALITY CODE, and Rainbow Studious deserves praise for there PS2 efforts. These guys are wqithout a doubt very good

I\'d agree to any score of high 8\' to low 9\'s from reviewers

My Initial impression grade is

9.0

I\'ll be playing it quite a bit this weekend so I will update my thoughts later. Splashdown is definitely cool

Originally posted by ddaryl

The game itself is challenging. If you mess up you will have trouble early on learning how to regain the lead, but it gets easier when you start to master the feel. If you mess up towards the middle or end of lap 3 it will be a close finish for you to win

Thank god you can do a quick restart without loading the track again. I´m almost thru my 3rd time (now on hard). I like how the tracks change their difficulty when playing easy or hard. On hard there are more corners and obstacles in the water.Also the daytime and weather change with the difficulty level.
Nile, Tokyo and Amazon gave me a hard time.

I\'ve got awhile to go before I try the harder modes

I just found out I can do tier 2 and tier 3 tricks anytime

guess I haven\'t actually pulled one off yet

Rainbow Rocks

yea i rented it this last week and its pretty nice looking

the water is amazing as most already know

but like ddaryl said its got a lot of depth

the only complaint i have is all the levels look a lot a like

but its nice how much you can explore out there - dang that tenitcle though

wow, I thought the game was good, but not so good. The problem now is all great games are launching at same time... thanx for the reviews

I was going to get this game (in UK) but heard it has major sound bugs? Is this true?

Originally posted by tomrob
I was going to get this game (in UK) but heard it has major sound bugs? Is this true?

My copy (US version) has sound problems when playing the movies ( intro etc.). The sound is skipping and has a strange reverb sometimes. During the race and inthe menue it`s fine though.

i think the initial shipment of the game had some manufacturing problems cause I have no bugs in my copy

some of the Euphoria has worn off on the game but its still quite excellent

the game doesn\'t miss a beat

alot of the courses share similiar attributes but at least there\'s 20 different ones

Alot of this is to be expected for a game like this since its not going to sell enough copies to warrant a larger production budget


The game is right on par with ATV offroad fury

in fact it is ATV offroad fury on water with better graphics