In Jeremy McGrath’s Offroad, players race four-wheeled 800 horsepower off road race trucks with tons of options including a host of tracks, single-player and multiplayer modes as well as a wide loadout of vehicle classes including Rally Cars, Pro Buggies, and Trophylite Trucks, all in crispy 1080p, 60 frames per second presentation. With multiplayer support for eight racers and a full career mode, Jeremy McGrath’s Offroad will be the title for racing fans who want to get down and dirty on the track...

Although, I am personally, not an aficionado of racing games, in truth I usually suck big time at them, the creators of Jeremy McGrath's Offroad feel that there is a gap in the market for an offroad dirt racer and who am I to say they’re wrong.

The game pits you as one of the drivers, though not Mr McGrath, still that gives you the enjoyment of beating the pants off someone who’s supposed to know what they are doing. The game follows the customary road racing games by including a career path as well as an on-line option, useful if being humiliated by strangers is your thing. There is also an Arcade mode where you can practice your slips and slides and it is these movements which are at the heart of the game.

Driving around the limited number of tracks is not unlike driving on ice, as the traction from the dust and dirt means that unless you plan your turns you're likely to end up in the scrub or even turning your vehicle over. Control isn’t as difficult as you might think as the game's steering is intuitive and pretty forgiving, you quickly learn how to position the car/truck/buggy to give yourself a nice slide through a bend. The bends come in three flavours easy, sharp and hairpin, but a bit of practice will get you through all three. To aid you further you have a handy navigator who will call out the turns as you approach. So responsive are the controls I beat the career in just over an hour, winning every race but one.

Within each class of race you can change your vehicles colour and type of tires, although doing this didn’t make the kind of dramatic changes to the handling that I thought they would, nor did the upgrades which you collect points towards. For collectors of trophies, well you should have them all in less than two hours, except for the 1000 miles trophy, there’s one gold, a bunch of silver and bronze to pick up, but no platinum, as this is a PSN release.

The physics of the game are a little less than real world, but that’s not the point. There is a market for those hardcore types of games, but for drivers like myself the learning curve is steep and ultimately uninteresting. What this game has going for it is its arcade sensibility.

The emphasis here is on fun and nothing else, meaning even an idiot like myself can have fun racing. Likewise the real reason for the existence of such games is not to sit at home like a billy-no-mates, but to get on line and try and drive some poor nine year old into the dirt, although the reality is that the bugger will probably still be a better driver.

Games are fragmenting into three camps. At one end you have the really cheap mobile games, at the other monster games, like Mass Effect 3. Jeremy McGrath's Offroad, falls between these two camps and so should be judged on the merits of a relatively inexpensive game.

The 1080 visuals are detailed and smooth, although travelling at 120 mph you won’t really get much time to see the scenery. That said, I could have taken a baseball bat to the biplane pilot who kept distracting me from the road. Game play is fluid and although you only have a limited number of tracks, these fly by at 60 fps. The music is ok, but it would still have been preferable to have the option to play your own music.

Positioned, as it is in the inexpensive price bracket, this game offers a lot of fun, but whether it lives or dies will rely on the building up of an online community.

7

Charles Packer