Deathtrack

The Good
Deathtrack is one thing - FUN. Load up your rockets, caltrops, guns, and mines. Get on the race track. Go green on a mortal combat demolition derby. Then, assuming you're still alive, go back to the shop for some more... There's an enjoyable, predatory sense to Deathtrack; you can hunt down your enemies one by one, gain revenge for that misplaced rocket in the last race, or just sit back and launch stuff until the racetrack is filled with burning hulks. All the other drivers have distinct personalities, and their cars become increasingly bizarre (as does yours). You'll find yourself going round and round the championship circuit for hours.

The Bad
The main problem with Deathtrack is the repetition - the game doesn't appear to ever end. This is fun for a long while, but once you've gone around the same set of tracks ten or more times, dropped a few thousand caltrops, and are pretty much invincible, the game loses a certain amount of replay value.

The Bottom Line
Despite the myriad car-shooter games that preceded and followed Deathtrack, the game has a pure, antisocial quality to it that most others lack. No storyline, no complications - just round-the-track adrenaline. It may not keep you engaged beyond a week, but the ride is great fun while it lasts.

The Good
I'll begin this review by first stating that I'm incredibly biased -- I love Deathtrack, with illogical reason. It just pushed all of my buttons, I guess. The pseudo-Road-Warrior 1980's costumes appeal to me since I grew up in that era (yes, they seem silly to me now, but they represent a more innocent time). Mad Max was a big cult hit, and being able to drive cars with rocket launchers mounted to the roof of your car and a machine gun mounted to the hood was very appealing. Dynamix also used their EGA digitizing technique to mostly good effect in capturing the actors and city pictures. For a fixed 16-color palette, it looks pretty good. (It probably served as good practice for their later self-published game David Wolf: Secret Agent.)

Playing the game is pretty easy to grasp: Choose a car, outfit it with weapons, then race. Blow up anyone in your way. Use your winnings to upgrade your car. Buy bigger weapons Try to win the championship. Not much more to it than that, but then again, it was Jeff Tunnell's philosophy that games were too complicated and punished the user; Deathtrack, conversely, feels very "easy" to play.

The economics of upgrading your car is like resource management for dummies. You kill as many people as possible to earn as much money as possible to upgrade your car as much as possible. Since I'm a dummy, it was intoxicating.

The Bad
The AI was fairly dumb; cars wouldn't put forth much effort to get you into their gunsights, so you could just go weave back and forth across the track to avoid getting shot. When you were lined up for that split second, drop a mine and say goodbye to the car. They weren't very quick to drop caltrops or mines either, so just line up a car on a straightaway, launch a missle up their tailpipe, and avoid the debris.

The weapons loadout had some inconsistencies as well; for example, you could load the front and back of your car with spikes, and literally ram/puncture people off the road. This seems okay, until you realize that these same cars can withstand multiple missle blasts, and it seems that some measly spikes (okay, BIG spikes) wouldn't be able to take them out quite so easily.

If you had just the right machine (an 80286 was ideal), the framerate was a good blend of detail and speed. But if you had a much slower or faster machine, Dynamix's way of adjusting that was to let you control how much detail was on the screen. This was fine for slower machines, but on fast machines, you can't add enough detail to get the game running properly. It's ludicrously fast on anything past a 386/33. Unfortunately, they repeated this behavior in other games, like David Wolf: Secret Agent and Motocross.

Although the city/track descriptions were quite varied with nice pictures and text, the tracks themselves all looked more or less the same.

Finally, the music was lacking, and the sound was merely sufficient. I never understood why Dynamix's early games supported Tandy/PCjr graphics just fine, but never bothered to take advantage of the built-in sound chip in those machines.

The Bottom Line
A fun futuristic racing shoot-em-up that accomplishes what it sets out to do. If you can overlook its oversights, then strap yourself in and kick some 1980's booty!

The Good
It's vehicular combat! I simply love the concept of driving & destroying, I like Quarantine and Interstate '76, although those games are first person shooters on wheels while Deathtrack is a racing game.

• It's got personality and a dark post-apocalyptic atmosphere. The opponents have got character and there is some dark humor in the game (for instance the descriptions of weapons).
• It's got more different weapons than other "racing with weapons" type of games. Some of the weapons are pretty cool & original, especially the Terminators. These skate-boards with a bomb keep racing around the track after you've launched them so watch your back.
• 3D modeled cars & digitized images of opponents.

The Bad

• Poor audio, where is the sound of roaring engines?
• Driving doesn't feel like driving. You don't get the feeling that you are really driving a car.
• The gameplay can be a bit unforgiving. If you drive a bad race and have a lot of damage you probably don't have enough cash to repair the damage. And when your car is in no condition to race you're stuck.
• Runs way too fast on a modern PC and MoSlo doesn't seem to work. So you can't play it unless you still have a 286.

The Bottom Line
An extremely cool vehicular combat game with attitude. I wish I never got rid of my old 286.

The Good
I don't like racing games. I really don't. I don't even like driving my car. It's boring. So why would I like to play such a game in my free time? The only exception to that is those games with an edge - those games where you shoot, crash, destroy, exterminate, wipe out, run down, annihilate, or any combination of them, your opponents and innocent bystanders. But this game, although not the first of its kind, is still great, and spawned such games as Hi Octane, Death Rally and Rollcage.
You see, I used to play a lot of Test Drive (don't ask), and it annoyed the hell out of me. I couldn't figure out why I there had to be any other cars on the road. I kept trying to push them off the road but it never worked. Oh, the horror!
Imagine my delight when I first met Deathtrack - not only you can crash other cars into things - you get to SHOOT them! You can even lay mines, and hope the other cars will drive on them. Sometimes you got paid to kill blow up another car - and the funny thing is - you'd have done it anyway!
God, this game was fun. No more boring drives through a winding road. If someone dares to overtake you - SHOOT him!
There is a life lesson here somewhere - but I'll be damned if I know what it is…

Deathtrack featured a cool vector engine for its time, which runs fast, although its nothing like the phenomenal Stunt Car Racer.

The Bad
Well, you remember the great radio stations in Outrun? Where you had a choice between several great tunes? Nothing like that here. In Deathtrack, you get a sleepy Adlib tune, which sounds as if it was written under the influence of several sleeping pills. It sounds like it is supposed to be exhilarating, but only manages the opposite.
The AI is really bad - and it often seems that the other drivers are morons, but then again, it seems like that to me all the time.


The Bottom Line
Deathtrack is the game I want to play in real life - shoot morons off the road.
[Someone tell the nice man in the white robe that I am perfectly sane. I don't need a shot. Really!]