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Rating: Good From the creators of Twisted Metal 2 at SingleTrac, Rogue Trip is heads and shoulders above its current competition, Vigilante 8, but it fails to live up to the standard set by the grand-daddy of all vehicular combat games, Twisted Metal 2 (TM2). It's very clear when playing Rogue Trip that it is the true sequel to TM2. It may not carry the TM name or have any of the characters or weapons from TM2, but it looks like Twisted Metal (only much better) and it feels like Twisted Metal. This is definitely a good thing. The characters of TM2 have been replaced by a cast of unfamiliar, but equally appealing characters, including Elvis impersonator Elvis D. Kang and Richard "Dick" Biggs, who drives a giant weiner-mobile. SingleTrac has added a totally new gameplay element to vehicular combat games with tourists that must be picked up so you get cash, which you need to pay for health refills and weapon upgrades. In theory, this is a good idea that could have added a lot to the game, but in execution it only seems to get in the way of the matter at hand: killing the other drivers and blowing stuff up real good. And really, that's what vehicular combat games are all about. It's a pain to have to hunt down tourists and it can be frustrating when you're almost dead and you can't find a freakin' health recharge station, but the intense combat and completely destruct-able environments manage to make up for this. Rogue Trip also shines in two areas that Vigilante 8 is particularly weak in: control and Artificial Intelligence. The control in Vigilante 8 is troublesome to say the least, but Rogue Trip's control is dead-on, and the simple press of a button lets you pull of U-Turns with ease. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Vigilante 8 often times just approached you and basically waited to be killed; Rogue Trip's enemies act just the opposite. In the game's early levels, the enemy drivers are fairly passive and won't go after you unless you provoke them, but as the game progresses, the AI gets smarter and smarter and before long it's a force to be reckoned with. As good as the AI is in the single-player game, the multi-player modes are even more entertaining. Besides the usual split-screen option, Rogue Trip lets you use the Link Cable so that two players can play each other, each on their own TV screen. You can even double the hook-up and play with four players at once, although this requires four TVs, four PlayStations, and four Rogue Trip CDs. Still, if you've got the means to make it happen, the four-player Link Cable game is an experience you will never forget. The only thing that prevents Rogue Trip from becoming a must-have game is the insane difficulty. Twisted Metal 2 allowed you to copy down a password between each level, and Rogue Trip allows you to save your game to a memory card between each level with no password-copying necessary. The big difference is that you started back with three lives when you loaded your game in TM2, while Rogue Trip gives you three lives and no more for the entire game. This is very unbalanced and makes Rogue Trip way too hard to beat. This is a nasty habit SingleTrac has developed that also plagued the Jet Moto series. I can't recommend buying Rogue Trip due to its artificially inflated difficulty level, but it's still a great rental and will probably be the best vehicular combat game released this year.
© 2001 ivan@mastergamer.com