With the dawn of 32-bit consoles developers were scrambling to release arcade style racing games to compete with Ridge Racer. There’s a reason why most of them aren’t still around; it was entirely too easy to get the formula wrong. I pity those that expected Namco quality from the plethora of budget bin copycats. One of these such releases, Deadheat Road, was only released in Japan and for good reason. Sony’s quality control probably had to step in to prevent localization of this one. It’s really that bad. Today I’m going to tell you why this is one of the worst racing games I’ve played.
There’s no story here. You’re thrown right into the mix with no set up or explanation. Hey, that’s just how Deadheat Road rolls. The game offers several different options for you to tinker with including controls and difficulty but that’s all basic stuff. Let’s get to the real game. You can choose between three different modes of gameplay. The first is your basic race against opponents to come in first place. It’s your basic ‘grand prix’ or whatever you want to call it. Then there’s a ‘free’ mode which is just what it sounds like. You can drive around one of the two tracks endlessly. This is used to help you memorize the layout. Lastly there’s a time trial mode for competing against yourself.
With all that out of the way how does Deadheat Road actually play? Not very well. It’s not like I was expecting a realistic physics engine or anything like that, this is a 32-bit console after all and even then I’m left disappointed. By default the view is first person but you can change this by pressing the triangle button. You hold X to accelerate, and the square to brake which allows you to power-slide around corners. In theory, at least. The controls are pretty basic and there aren’t any bells or whistles such as nitro. It’s supposed to be realistic street style racing with arcade gameplay.
Problems rear their head almost instantly. For example, your car moves like it’s held to the ground with magnets. The tires have no ‘give’ and it makes the controls far too stiff for my liking. The issue is that the steering wheel instantly snaps back whenever you make a turn. There’s nothing gradual about it. Your car struggles to make it around turns, and pressing the brakes causes you to start drifting. Unfortunately you tend to lose all control in these situations. I find myself sliding sideways right into the edge of each track. If there’s a way to successfully drift around turns in this game I couldn’t find it, and had to rely on braking as a means to slow down instead of slide.
The physics engine is pretty terrible. Whenever you hit an object you sort of bounce off of it. No matter how big it is the other vehicle in questions is pushed forward and you’re slowed down temporarily. It looks downright goofy when you smack into a truck and it reacts like a balloon. What’s more is that if you hit something hard enough you go into an automatic spin-out. This makes zero sense sometimes and can come completely out of left field. The two race tracks are pretty narrow and that makes it difficult to avoid running into other cars or even the railing.
Deadheat Road is sorely lacking in content. I’ve mentioned it a few times already, but there are just two tracks in the entire game. That wouldn’t be so bad but they’re extremely similar to one another. They’re both city scenes at night, and have the same traffic and scenery. Having two is pretty unnecessary when the only major difference is that the second one has tunnels in it. The only thing I liked at all about the stages is that the first has a pretty neat transition into the daytime. The changing time is very basic, but it’s just about all Deadheat Road has going for it.
This game was never released outside of Japan. Despite that, for some odd reason, 90% of it is in English. That makes it really easy for someone to import considering the fact that the menus are entirely readable. It’s a big question mark as to why this one was never localized considering all of the translation work was already done. Just goes to show you that the publisher was readily aware that they had a stinker on their hands, and that it had no chance of selling in any market.
Deadheat Road is a real mess when it comes to graphics. The game is okay looking when still, but in motion the engine stutters and suffers from a lot of pop-in. You can only see a certain distance in front of you, but the game still struggles with loading in new aspects. What’s more is that the backgrounds are very clearly static images of city-lines. They’re very low resolution and look bad even on a standard definition television. It looks very cheap. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who actually thinks this game looks nice. The music on the other hand is really good. I dug the pop-techno track that plays during gameplay, but I wish there was more music. The sound effects are pathetic though with very unrealistic samples used for collisions. It almost sounds like dodge balls hitting pavement when you strike another vehicle.
Perhaps it’s not very fair to be so hard on an early PlayStation title, but other releases fared a lot better in this time and had significantly more content. Deadheat Road is just a poor excuse for an arcade style racer. The controls are just too unwieldly, graphics are poor, and there’s a big lack of content in this disc. Usually I can find something to like in just about any package but I really struggled with this one. Even if you’re desperate for something you haven’t played before I still can’t recommend tracking Deadheat Road down.
