Calling All Cars! PS3 Review

Calling All Cars! is a downloadable game from the Playstation Network by the makers of Twisted Metal Black. Now that might get your hopes up but not so fast, just because of the pedigree doesn’t mean this is going to be an insane game keeping you up at night. Calling All Cars! is a family friendly game, anyone can pick it up, nothing crude or offensive about this one, it’s simple to play yet there is some strategy to work on if you plan to come out on top the majority of the time. The game features a quick single player mode, a campaign mode and a multiplayer mode, with optional bots.

Now lets get down to the nitty gritty here, first off I didn’t purchase this game I got it free with my Qore subscription, that right off the bat should have signaled something. But I’m getting ahead of myself, first up is the graphics which have a cartoon style. Not a cell shaded look that everyone and their brother talks about when they mention a cartoon game these days but a “drawn on paper” cartoon look. I would like to see more games use this to their advantage as it really is a slick presentation.

The sound is a standard fare with sirens and explosions and some voice work thrown in, nothing special, but it works. Now the gameplay is what really brings this down, you drive around looking for a crook who just dug his way out of jail. You hit him with your car, he flies into the air, hopefully landing in your car and you bring him to jail. All the while the other people are chasing you, firing their weapons and hoping to get the crook in their car to bring him to justice and score points themselves. You only score points for bring a crook to jail and at the end of the round the person with the most points win. There’s also different points of entry into the jail, each one slightly more difficult to maneuver into which give you more points if you complete the process.

Sounds like it should be loads of fun, right? Grab the crook, haul ass back to the jail while shit blows up all around you and enemies come at you from all sides, rinse repeat. Well it’s not bad but it ends up being bland bordering on boring. First bad point you chose a car which doesn’t have any stats represented anywhere. Come on we’re gamers, we love stats, especially for items that represent us in a game. The weapons a acquired like Mario Kart, like Mario Kart, they slot machine around till randomly you get one and can use it. However instead of a slew of cool weapons you get three, yes three, a homing missile, a giant mallet and a magnet. The mallet and missile eject the crook out of someones car if they are holding him and the magnet pulls him into your car if you have it locked on their car long enough. There are not other power-ups or upgrades.

See where this is going? You also have a nitro boost but that too has a danger, if you hit someone while carrying the crook the enter that persons vehicle, conversely if you hit them while on nitro and they have the crook you get him. So the easiest strategy to win at this game is wait until the person carrying the crook gets close enough to the jail, ram them with nitro and score the points yourself. You can even do this a fraction of a second before they enter the jail and really piss people off. You never have to capture the crook or run from the other players, stick to mostly defense and you can rack up some good points. With no other weapons or power-ups this game boils down to free-for-all capture the flag with bumper cars.

And that is really the the weak point of this game, for it’s cool art style and mayhem ready battlefield there is this part of the game that feels missing. There is nothing that makes me want to keep coming back and play, sure there are cars to unlock but what do they do? There’s not enough destruction it’s all been sanitized and simplified, which in this case hurts this game. The maps are small and are limited to 4 players as well, which doesn’t really help the mayhem part either. As a demo this would be a good sampling, as a full game, coming free with Qore is really the only reason to justify having it. You’ll noticed I didn’t refer to the multiplayer, well that’s because everytime I went on to play there seemed to be only 5 or 6 people playing at one time. On top of that my connection was dropped with me only being able to complete 1 game but it felt the same as playing the computer so really it didn’t add anything.

Pros:

• Good Art Style
• Simple Gameplay
• Free With Qore

Cons:

• Simple Game, Only 3 Power-Ups!
• Limited to 4 Players
• No One On Multiplayer
• Feels Like a Demo

Conclusion: It’s not worth the money to buy, coming with Qore it might be fun to play if you need a quick 5 minute game with your friends while you are all waiting to get on something better.