One series I used to hear about in my teen years was Destruction Derby. I guess all of the cool kids were playing it while I was left out in the cold. It’s one of those games that you can tell just about everything you need to know about it from the title alone. Today I loaded it up for the first time and spent several hours tearing metal and burning rubber. But is it any good?
Okay so maybe you can’t tell everything about it from the name alone. I was surprised to discover that Destruction Derby is first and foremost a racing game. Yes, it’s not all about banging up cars, and that’s a good thing. Staying true to the name however damage to your vehicle and others is central to gameplay. You have a diagram of your car in the bottom right hand corner of the screen with numerous green arrows pointing at different sections of the machine. They change color as you incur more damage, and you can even see the vehicle getting beat up in the model itself as the hood starts caving in or windows break. When one part of the car takes too much damage the race ends immediately.
The first play mode, and it’s the main one, is called Wreckin’ Racing. Here your success is monitored by how many points you manage to rack up. You earn these based on two factors; your final placement in said race and the mayhem you’re able to stir up with the other drivers. Spinning them out as well as completely destroying their car is how it’s done here. Honestly it’s pretty fun and refreshing that your only objective isn’t to win. You also have a stock car race which is more traditional and your success is entirely based on finishing ahead of the other competitors. These modes share the same courses between them. You also have time trials but that’s boring.
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| Whoever thought the narrow course design was a good idea should be fired. |
Last but not least, and what most people are probably anticipating with the name, is the Destruction Derby. This takes place in a bowl like arena and the last car that can still drive is the winner. As you can imagine this mode of play is pure chaos. There are so many computer controlled cars it’s ridiculous and they leave you no time to breathe. This isn’t as fun as it sounds. I found the actual derby to be frustrating and the poor AI makes it kind of boring. The arena is pretty small as well so doubling back to find a better vantage is a moot point. I found it can be pretty easy if you just stay moving the entire time, but there’s very little strategy involved. What’s worse is that if you lose you have to sit there and wait for the match to finish off-screen which is really annoying.
My beef with Destruction Derby is the courses. They’re very small and claustrophobic, and in some areas they funnel down to even thinner gameplay areas. This means big pile-ups are commonplace. This wouldn’t be so bad except the courses are so short you’re sure to lap the other drivers. The result is you getting trapped behind walls of enemy cars forced to damage your own vehicle to maintain your standing. The controls are a little sloppy and it often feels like you’re driving through mud, and hitting a foe or being on the receiving end can send you spinning far too often. When this occurs it’s painstaking to turn around and get back on track because you’re not only battling the controls but the narrow courses as well.
What’s off putting is that this game suffers from what I like to call that ‘early Playstation funk.’ It was released in a time when, with this new console, developers were trying too hard to appeal more to adults and so they made their menus and interface very stale and painstakingly boring. It took me a good few minutes to even figure out how to get the settings how I wanted them when I first played because of this, and it seems like every single menu is locked behind a loading screen. The word ‘functional’ obviously wasn’t in the developer’s vocabulary when designing the layout here. Most everything about Destruction Derby feels dated because of this.
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| It’s as hectic as it looks. |
For an early PS1 game Destruction Derby isn’t half bad to look at. That’s hardly a lot of praise however. The cars are blocky but I found myself somewhat impressed with the way the damage shows on them. Unfortunately the cars (especially from behind) look more like textured boxes than anything. When there’s too many on-screen at once they sometimes disappear only to show up again in the most inopportune places. The worst offense however is the backgrounds. They’re walls textured to look like mountains, beaches, or crowds and they look just awful. When you get close they’re extremely blocky and it really breaks the immersion. This is something that plagued the console throughout its run because developers were so bent on trying to make things look as photo-realistic as possible that they used real photos for textures. It was ugly back then and so you can only imagine how it looks now. The music is really good, but fails to match the on-screen carnage. You would expect ripping guitar and heavy rock music, but instead the developers went with techno electronic. I like it, but it just doesn’t fit.
Destruction Derby at its best is mildly entertaining. When you get the hang of the sluggish controls sliding around corners is rewarding. These good feelings are short lived as you’re far too often going to run into a wall of wreckage which completely ruins the pace of the race. The Destruction Derby mode (which should be the main course) is pretty overwhelming to be honest and just about as barebones as you can get. If you were looking for a racing game at the time of release Ridge Racer was a much better choice, and if you wanted to destroy some cars Twisted Metal had your number. There just wasn’t much room for Destruction Derby, and it’s even less viable now.
