Split/Second Review

The 360/PS3 generation was pretty good in terms of racing/driving games. We had games like FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage, Blur, Need For Speed, Grid, Forza, Project Gotham, Test Drive Unlimited, Sonic & Sega All-Stars, and countless more. Developers seemed to always be trying different things to create new experiences in what can be a pretty stale genre at times. The most ambitious title during this time was Split/Second from the now-defunct Black Rock Studio.

Split/Second instantly stands out because it has a bit of a story without actually having a story. It’s basic at best, but it works for this type of game. You’re a contestant on a reality show trying to survive a destructible track while attempting to take out other drivers with various Power Plays across each track. These are obtained by drafting behind other racers or by drifting around corners. It gives you a lot of incentive to stay with the pack of drivers, as triggering those Power Plays that pop up all over the track is more manageable.

There are three tiers of Power Plays, with the first couple tiers being fairly standard explosions, pedestrian bridges falling onto the track, and excavators smacking racers off the track, among other things. You can even open some shortcuts in certain situations. It’s the third tier when you fill your Power Play bar that can change the game. These traps can completely change the track and simultaneously take out a group of racers. One of my favorite moments was blowing up a building that took out all four racers in front of me as I raced through the narrow path it left to victory. Another moment, I saw a passenger jet blow up as I was racing under it, crushing me in the process. There are many moments like that throughout the game, and you’ll never know what will happen next.

With all the action going on, it can sometimes be pretty challenging to know what’s happening in Split/Second, but Black Rock did a great job providing many visual cues so that you don’t run straight into a wall or anything like that. Still, it can get pretty crazy when you have 3 or 4 explosions going off quickly, which can be common when racing in a pack of people. It’s a game that visually holds up well for something that came out in 2010. The lighting, in particular, looks excellent and makes each environment pop, especially when those explosions go off. I wish there were a few more environments. Although there are a bunch of tracks, they’re based on the same 4-5 environments.

The single-player mode is structured like a TV show over a 12-episode season. Each season starts with four unlocked races, and winning or placing in a race rewards players with credits. Credits unlock each season’s elite race and additional cars. The way this is presented allows you to play more of the types of races you like and less of the ones you don’t. There are some traditional game modes like Survival, Elimination, and Race. Detonator is one of my favorites, where all the Power Plays are blowing up around you all race long. Air Strike and Air Revenge were another couple of superb additions where you’re trying to avoid missiles and trying to take out a helicopter, respectively. 

I liked their minimalistic HUD, which I can’t recall seeing before. You have your Power Play bar, position, and lap number in small neon writing behind your car, and that’s it. It lets you take everything in much better and makes it feel like you’re watching an action movie. The music puts you into that feeling as well. It’s a grandiose instrumental score that wouldn’t be out of place in the latest blockbuster. The sound effects are just as impressive and had my subwoofer booming a ton during my entire playthrough. It was fun to trigger those explosions and feel the destruction through that bass. The positional audio was terrific.

What sets Split/Second apart from other racers is that you have to understand the track you’re playing on to succeed. You have to learn where the Power Plays are and how to try and avoid getting hit by them while triggering them at the proper time to take out as many opponents as possible. You must ensure you won’t hit yourself with them because you definitely can (and I have more times than I’d like to admit). It’s fun to try to perfect your run and save your Power Play for the perfect moment or to take out everyone right before the finish line. The problem is that it can be equally as frustrating.

There aren’t many issues with Split/Second, but the major one (as with a few other racing games of this era) is the relentless rubber banding. You’ll never shake the CPU opponents, no matter how well you race. This is partly due to how vital drafting is, but it doesn’t remove frustration. There are races you’ll feel like you can never win no matter what you do, and the ones that you do feel like a significant struggle. It takes the fun factor down a bit at times, but it’s not the end of the world, either.

At one point, there was an 8-player multiplayer mode, which was removed after Black Rock was closed down. It was a pretty fun game to play with friends, with all the mayhem everyone caused, and each race ended up being like a Detonator race. It was a strategic game to play against other humans, even more so than CPUs, because everything was unpredictable. On the bright side, you can still play 2-player split-screen, so there’s still something there for multiplayer!

Split/Second was one of my favorite racers from this era. The rubber banding can get annoying, but the way the tracks change as you play hasn’t been replicated very much since then. It’s a game I’ll be going back to again and again.