Knight Rider: The Game

The Good
The answer is simple: it is Knight Rider. I thought due to the nostalgia factor it will provide a good gameplay. I was wrong...

The Bad
Everything else than the fact that the company - Davilex - bought the name. This company has a history in budget games on PSX and PS2. They can boast with (or rather be ashamed of) such games like London Racer, Europa Racer and so on with other "racer" titles. These were all budget games.

And so Knight Rider became such a budget game too! The code is crappy for I played on a dual core system with 1 GB of video and 2 GB normal memory, but the game still became choppy at certain points. And due to the lack of programming skills I don't think it would even work more modern system than Windows XP. Sometimes it is a challenge to run it on that system as well.

The controls are difficult too, since it's easier to make a J-turn from complete stop than to normally turn the car at normal speed. Although if you played some Davilex titles before than it won't be problem.

The graphics would be mediocre if the were not so much of the clipping errors. And the other thing that the dashboard of KITT is just awfully under designed! Everything is black and the buttons or LEDs are just plain. The digital speed-o-meter ugly. And sometimes, if you're lucky, you will be able to see KITT's visual peaks moving on the dashboard.

And now the gameplay: It's a joke. It's over scripted so don't expect any difference if you play one of the missions for the hundredth time. Now it seems that the designer of the game wanted to alloy two completely different genres: the driving and jumping platform games. Here in this game you have to jump around with KITT from rooftop to rooftop then balance on a beam with the car using ski mode! Everything is rather solved by the Turbo Boost however.

And finally some words about the music and sound: The music is some late '90s crappy techno sometimes featuring the original main title of the TV series. In theory this game chronologically plays somewhere in the '80s. What is more outrageous than this though? The fact that some of the effects were just simply cropped from the movie!!! You can even hear the tape hissing, if the crappy techno is not louder than the effects! So it seems at Davilex the programmers, the designers, the composer are all dilettantes! They're not even amateurs for they evidently didn't like the series just wanted to finish the job. Then I have a question to them: Why did you buy the franchise then?

The Bottom Line
It is a cheaply realized strange mixture of a crappy budget racing and an even crappier budget platform game. The only thing that makes it salable is that Davilex bought the Knight Rider license. It's such an offense if you're a Knight Rider fan. Poor Glen A. Larson is turning in his grave although he is not even died yet!