May 18, 2005 - Guns, cars, bitches. That's the long and short of 187: Ride or Die. Though, Ubisoft's concise synopsis is a bit less blunt, "The short description would be racing combat with a mature storyline -- the story of two crime bosses, Dupree and Cortez." The story of crime bosses and their thugs, anyway. Specifically, the story of a thug named Buck.
As Buck, players will roll for Dupree, who controls the Southside of LA. Cortez wants to take that away from our boss, so he went and shot old Dupes about nine times. But the damn fool lived. And now you run vengeance missions for him.
Sound dangerous? It is. Who'd want to run missions against a guy prone to shooting other guys nine times? Well, at least Buck will have support. In his quest to rise to gangland stardom, he'll employ a variety of super hot killer-bitches. His cadre of babes drive him to and fro as he guns down the opposition and runs errands. The basic gist of the game: Race, assassinate, deliver, survive, escort and generally shoot people while a fly ass girl in tight leather cutoffs steers your hot ride through over 56 different story-driven levels.
From what we've seen and played, Ride or Die features Hot Pursuit 2-like environments, a fast engine, a lot of speedy peripheral blurring, about 30 cars, and a variety of drive + shoot missions that lead right into a pretty robust multiplayer component.
In the singleplayer game, players are assigned a mission, a car and one of the scantily clad women drivers. They then control the car and the shooting independently, similar to Starsky & Hutch. Since this control scheme is inherently a bit taxing, 187 utilizes two different setups. One is a semi lock-on basic control system that lets players snap to targets and blindly fire like crazy, but only at certain degrees. The other is a totally manual system that lets gamers aim a targeting reticle with the right analog stick while the left continues to steer (on PC, keys could steer and the mouse could shoot).
When it becomes necessary to shoot at people behind the player car (which will happen frequently), an artificial intelligence bot will take control of the pimped ride, though it'll drive a bit slower to maintain balancing. Ubisoft reps were quick to point out they didn't want "no half-assed shooting and half-assed racing game" after pointing all of these features out.
What? I Ain't Doing Nothing Wrong, Officer!
The racing component certainly feels solid enough. The game is fast and features a lot of straight arcade highway action highlighted by a lighting system similar to Underground's, though the levels we've seen were very bright and vivid, which is probably a requirement given how much action the gamer is asked to keep track of on-the-fly.
While frantically weaving between civilian cars and slamming into enemy cars, we'll be firing off machineguns, bazookas, mines, Molotov cocktails and other vicious weapons categorized into things that hurt drivers and things that hurt cars. To a certain extent, all of the damage we deal and take will also alter the performance of in-play cars, but it won't ever completely ruin a player or bot's ability to drive until that player actually dies.
If you do get walloped into a wall and find yourself losing position in a race, losing time on a lead car, or falling way behind a target, it should still be pretty easy to catch up. Note that 187 doesn't use the rubber band AI system of Burnout, though. What it does is "encourage" AI cars to "make mistakes" if you're doing too poorly and they're doing too well. This mistake system is something the developers are particularly proud of, actually.
Beyond all this, Ride or Die's multiplayer gameplay will feature four-player online with each player given dominion over their entire screen. Additionally, an eight-player online mode is available, but that requires each participating system to play a two-player screen game. We didn't get to see much of multiplayer, but the idea behind car combat is something we know works well (thank you, Twisted Metal). Because of that, we're anxious to get a build in and thoroughly check it out, especially since the game more heavily emphasizes actual racing.
Expect more detailed impression to post shortly before the game ships this summer on GameCube, PC, PS2 and Xbox.
