Vigilante 8

After last week’s review, I found myself in the mood for a vehicular combat game.  I thought a lot about playing one of the Twisted Metal titles I own, but decided I would save them for later.  They aren’t that far out of the ordinary anyway.

Instead, I turned a game that’s very near and dear to my heart, Vigilante 8.  The genre is almost extinct now, but in the late 90’s/early 00’s, vehicular combat games were everywhere.  The genre, at least in its 3D form, was essentially created by Twisted Metal and most of the games that followed it tried to one up the early PS1 title.  TM was filled with crazy cars, bizarre characters and cartoonish stages, so others tried to compete by trying to get crazier, weirder and more “out there,” usually to mixed results.

Vigilante 8, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction.  Set in the Southwestern United States in the 1970’s, V8 ditched the demonic ice cream trucks and guys stuck between two giant wheels for realistic cars and trucks.  No grim reaper riding a motorcycle here, you have a truck driver, a disco maniac, a government agent and a conspiracy theorist.  The game puts you in control of members of one of two factions, with the evil Coyotes hell-bent on causing as much damage as possible and the Vigilantes trying their best to stop them.  There’s still plenty of suspension of disbelief required, but Vigilante 8 is substantially more grounded in reality than any of its contemporaries.  

It’s been a while since I started with graphics, so lets get back to doing that here.  V8 doesn’t look all that great.  The graphics are very, very choppy and jagged, even for a PS1 game.  I don’t think any game was helped more by the smoothing features of the PS2/PS3.  That’s great, but those features still don’t help with the overly dark locales and ugly, brown heavy color palette.  I get that its supposed to be the southwest, but there is way too much dull brown and gray.  It’s especially jarring when you move on to the few levels that are brighter and more colorful.  At least the cars look good and the animation is fluid.  The cutscenes are top quality too.  Sound is also a mixed bag.  The music in the stages is barely audible and what you can hear isn’t great.  On the contrary, the sound effects are great and the crisp, clear explosion sounds really add to the game.

But graphics aren’t everything.  The gameplay is what stands out here.  You have 8 cars selectable from the start with 4 more to unlock.  Beat the game with all 12 and you unlock two unique multiplayer stages and the 13th vehicle, a flying saucer (which stands out as even more ridiculous given what we just talked about).  Each character needs to clear four stages, with the final stage featuring a battle against their “rival” from the opposing team.  The Coyotes are tasked with destroying landmarks, whereas  the Vigilantes need to protect them.  If I can make one complaint, its that the protection missions are way more difficult and frustrating.  I’ve never been one of those “ehrmagerd I’m so cool I play as the bad guys” types, so that was a little disappointing.  It certainly isn’t gamebreaking though.

Each car is ranked in three categories, speed, armor and aim.  They also have a unique special move.  The developers did a really good job of balancing things here.  One of the big criticisms of the first Twisted Metal is that some of the cars are just inherently stronger than the others.  I have always felt this was because: 1. The developers overvalued speed and 2. The stats in TM didn’t effect the vehicles all that much.  

That isn’t the case in V8.  Slow cars are REALLY slow, while cars with high armor can take substantially more damage.  For my first play through the story, I decided to pick Beeswax, who drives a slow but beefy pickup truck.  It was so bad I started taking notes about busted control.  But when I did my second playthrough as Houston, who drives a sports car, It was super tight and responsive.  Of course, I also bit the dust after only a few hits whereas Beeswax’s pickup could absorb dozens of direct shots.  That’s the way it should be and its how games like this remain balanced.

The weapon selection here is also pretty solid, you have a mortar, mines, a top mounted cannon as well as homing and straight missiles.  Your car can carry three at a time and you will visibly see each attached to your vehicle.  It’s a nice touch and it also prevents you from having to constantly check the HUD.  Each character also has their own unique special attack.  All of them are useful in some way, and many of them feel like fixed versions of Twisted Metal weapons.  Level design is okay, some of the levels have very little to look at but most have at least a few hidden areas.  It’s fun to explore to see what you can find and the game almost necessitates it, as you need to do so to find weapons.  I also like that almost everything is destructible.

The game uses cutscenes and text snippets between levels to tell the story and expand on the background of each character.  The characters are all pretty interesting and, for the most part, are grounded in some semblance of reality (there’s the obvious exception of one being part robot, and the fact that you can unlock an alien).  The cars are all modeled after actual vehicles, at least I think they are because there aren’t any licensed names and I don’t know anything about cars.  Even though they chose to go for more realism, the vehicles still feel varied and interesting.  You have a few different sports cars, a pickup, a Jeep, a gremlin, a van, a Mack truck (I’m sorry, its a Moth truck) and even a school bus.  The characters are all pretty much 70s stereotypes, up to and including a guy in a gaudy disco suit and a Shaft ripoff.  That’s okay, as it actually fits the game’s motif.

All in all, V8 is an excellent game.  It’s certainly one of the better games in the vehicular combat genre, I would say only Twisted Metal 2 is better.  V8 did get a sequel, called Second Offense, for the N64 and Dreamcast.  It wasn’t quite as good but I still remember it getting solid reviews back in the day.  So what happened?  Well, for one thing, Vehicular combat games stopped being a thing soon after the turn of the century.  When was the last time you remember a new game like this coming out?  It’s a shame too because while the highs of the genre were very high, the lows were VERY low.  Even if you want to go back and play a vehicular combat game, your options for a good one are incredibly slim.  That being said, Vigilante 8 is an excellent place to start, especially if you are put off by the more bizarre and often disturbing aspects of the Twisted Metal games.

9/10

Play this if:

You want to play a vehicular combat game with more realistic cars

You like the idea of twisted metal, but can’t handle the bleak and creepy stuff

You feel the sudden urge to bust out some Bee Gees records and watch “Saturday Night Fever”

Avoid if:

Choppy graphics are a dealbreaker