When Activision's newest racing game, "Blur," is released on May 25th, it's going to be packed with a lot of features. The game includes everything from well Twitter integration to the long-lost four-player split screen mode, which should make racing game fans very happy. However, amongst the power-ups and nine tiers of rivals to work your way through in the solo campaign, there is one feature that you won't find in the single-player campaign of "Blur": time travel.
There has been a very apparent trend in this console generation's racing games, that seems to have started with Sega's "Full Auto," where players are allowed to rewind their progress in limited bursts, creating a second, or even third, chance for themselves. Whether they've crashed, or just want to take a tighter turn to shave a few hundredths of a second off their overall time, numerous games, including "Need For Speed Shift," "Dirt 2" and "Forza 3," have all incorporated the feature, but "Blur" is setting itself apart from the pack by not including it.
At a recent demo I was told that "Blur" doesn't need time travel because this game is more about, "jockeying for position, and having fun." Instead of offering a rewind feature, if you wreck out in "Blur" you'll respawn back on the track with momentum, by, as an Activision spokesperson put it, "The Hand of God." "Blur" puts more of a focus on power-ups instead of perfecting turns and this is just one example of how it emphasizes that, and shows off the over-the-top gameplay.
Depending on what kind of a gamer you are, you're likely to find yourself rooted in either one camp or the other on the subject of racing rewind. Whether you think that it takes away from the over all experience and brings too much of an arcade feel to games that are trying to position themselves as racing sims, or you think that you should be able to make corrections for your mistakes, there's a good chance that you're going to enjoy "Blur." After just thirty seconds with "Blur" it will be very clear that Bizarre Creations' latest game is firmly planted on the arcade side of the fence, and doesn't need to offer rewind to create an enjoyable experience, and that decision makes "Blur" that much more fun to play.