Split/Second

I've spent enough Saturday nights running arcade racer tournaments to know the difference between a gimmick and a genuine mechanic, and Split/Second's Power Play system is the real deal. The core loop is simple to explain but addictive to execute: build your power meter by drifting, drafting, and making aggressive overtakes, then spend it triggering environmental chaos on the track around you. We're talking collapsing bridges, helicopter bomb drops, tanker trucks igniting, and cargo planes screaming down the runway straight at you. The first time you detonate a fuel station over a pack of four rivals, you will absolutely lose your mind. The structure wraps this around a twelve-episode Season mode framed as a reality TV production, and it commits to the bit surprisingly well. Each episode opens with a slick TV-style intro, and the event variety keeps things from going stale too quickly. Standard races and Elimination rounds are the backbone, but the standout modes are Survival - where you dodge explosive barrels spilling off the back of a semi in a points race against the clock - and Air Strike, which pits you against a missile-launching helicopter in what amounts to a boss battle at 150mph. These modes understand that the Power Play idea is most fun when it's the entire point of the race, not just a side mechanic. So where does it fall short? The track count is limited. The game reuses its handful of locations throughout the full season, and while triggered Power Plays can permanently alter routes mid-race to keep laps feeling different, you will notice the repetition by episode eight. The handling model also draws the occasional criticism - lighter vehicles can get sent into unpredictable spins by nearby explosions, and nicking a wall at the wrong angle produces surprise crashes that feel more unfair than exciting. Veteran sim racers looking for nuanced car feel will find the driving itself fairly one-dimensional beneath the fireworks. The game is best understood as an action game that happens to involve cars, not a racing game that happens to have explosions. For multiplayer, the picture on PC is complicated. The Steam release supports 2-player split-screen offline and originally launched with 8-player online, but that online matchmaking is no longer functional. Getting online races going today requires a VPN or LAN tunnelling setup. Split-screen is only two players, which is the main reason I can't fully endorse this as a couch-party game for a group of four - the chaos is genuinely more fun against human opponents, but the infrastructure to easily do that is gone. If you have two friends who know their way around a VPN, it is still worth the setup effort. Solo players and two-person households will feel the limitation less sharply. For the right player - someone who wants arcade mayhem over precision driving, who is happy grinding a compact campaign solo or hunting down a friend for split-screen - this holds up better than its age might suggest. It landed a 79 on Metacritic and sits at Very Positive on Steam for good reason. It never got a sequel, which given how well the core idea works, remains genuinely frustrating.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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